


The Life and Lies of Gerard Way

by maybegasoline



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Future AU, Multi, bandombigbang 2012, biography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-01
Updated: 2012-07-01
Packaged: 2017-11-08 22:26:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybegasoline/pseuds/maybegasoline
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Have you ever wondered what dirty secrets Gerard Way may have kept inside all these years? Have you ever thought that perhaps there lay more than just love behind his marriage to Lindsey Ballato? Have you ever seen the glances Way used to shoot his guitarist, and wondered what it might mean? Find out the truth about everything, and get to know what really went on behind the scenes at all those My Chemical Romance shows! It begins in New Jersey, but where does it end? Read the upcoming biography ‘The Life and Lies of Gerard Way’ to find out, to be released in September, 2057. Get your copy soon at a bookstore near you!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Life and Lies of Gerard Way

**The Life and Lies of Gerard Way**

  
_By Pseu D. Onym  
Story told by Gerard Way_

  
**Prologue**   


Gerard Way is something of a legend. What has he not accomplished? At merely eighty years old (which is no age for a man), he has already had time to put out ten multiplatinum selling rock albums and tour the world with his extremely successful band My Chemical Romance, write sixteen graphic novels, including his debut series 'The Umbrella Academy' which has at the time of writing sold over 20 million copies all over the world, start and run his own art gallery in Los Angeles, featuring some of his most famous pieces throughout the years, and write several books, the last one being the story of his remarkable life; ‘The True Life of a Fabulous Killjoy’.

He got married to fellow artist and musician Lindsey Ballato in 2007, and their daughter Bandit Lee was born in 2009. And when he hasn't been busy being an artist and a musician and a writer and a father, he has fought drug addiction and depression, coming out on top after every struggle he has been put through. 

And for a man his age, he is still remarkably bright and articulate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with his memory, and he takes great pleasure in telling stories of his past.

So why would a man so clear-headed, so artistic, so bright, so strong, so perfectly capable of writing his own memoirs (something he has in fact already done) need me to do it for him, a second time? What about his own finished product was not satisfying to him, I wonder?

"I think really, what it was, I didn't stay true to myself in that book," he explains tentatively. We have met in a coffee shop not too far from his home in Los Angeles for the first of our interview sessions for this book, and he sips a double mocha cappuccino slowly. No one in their right mind can say that this man hasn't aged with dignity; he sports an impressive head of silvery hair, and though there are wrinkles in the corners of his eyes he still looks almost exactly the same as he did when he was thirty. The cane he uses to walk with nowadays only serves to remind one even _more_ of the blonde, pretty little thing he used to be when he was younger, and he still speaks out of the right side of his mouth. Yes, this is Gerard Way alright. 

"I didn't allow myself to tell the truth about certain things," he continues, "and it felt right at the moment but when I read it back, there was this whole other side of the story just burning in the back of my mind and I just decided that I couldn't keep it hidden anymore."

Did Lindsey know, I wonder over the rim of my coffee cup, because though he tries to hide what this is all about, I think I have it all figured out already. His eyes well up as he looks up to meet my eye, and I see his hands trembling, clutching his cup tightly.

"Yeah," he sighs and shakes a strand of silvery grey hair out of his face. "She did. I could never have lived with that secret alone." He sets his cup back down, and I see a lonely tear slide down his face, though he tries desperately to hide it. I reach across the table and grab his hand, and he smiles.

"I'll be okay this time."

  


**Chapter One: It Begins In New Jersey**  


My Chemical Romance (commonly known as 'MCR' or 'My Chem') was formed in 2001 and consisted until its break up in 2027 for the most part of guitarists Ray Toro and Frank Iero, and Way brothers Mikey and Gerard, bassist and vocalist, with several brief additions of other members.

When MCR took off, twenty four year old Gerard was severely depressed and alcoholic, and loneliness had been his closest friend for years, save for his younger brother Mikey. Band practices became a burden, and he would show up still in his pajamas because he simply didn't have the energy or motivation to even get dressed. Spurred by his band members he put all his time and effort into the band, but it was with a slight reluctance.

"I didn't really think we would make it," he recalls. "Everybody were telling us how great we were and how big we would become, and when Frankie for instance joined the band he was always telling us how we had been his favorite band for ages and how much faith he had in us, and I _wanted_ to believe him and everyone else, I really did. But I had already failed so many other things in my life, I had completely thrown away my career in comics and illustration, I had almost thrown away my _life_ at one point, and though I loved the band and it gave me such a purpose, I still didn't have the faith in myself that I could do it. The other guys, sure, they could achieve anything, but I just didn't think I was on the same level as them."

Regardless of Gerard's doubts, My Chemical Romance quickly took over the New Jersey music scene, and about six months after they had been formed, their first album was released on a local indie label, Eyeball Records. The recording sessions were overwhelming and a bit scary to the young band, and Gerard found himself getting nervous in ways he had never experienced before.

"I would get so drunk," he laughs bitterly, and I can see that he maybe is a little bit ashamed of himself. "There was such a performance anxiety going on, and I had never felt anything like that before. I thought I had to be amazing, I had to deliver, I had to be better than I had ever been, and I couldn't deal with that. It got to the point where I literally wouldn't get into the vocal booth if I hadn't had at least a couple of beers, often more. I fucked up a lot of takes, and it cost us a lot of money. I remember our co-producer Alex Saavedra punching me in the face just so I would get my shit together, because he was so fed up with me."

Though the experience proved useful, and Way admits that he learned a lot.

"We all did," he explains proudly. "We became a band, not just a couple of friends getting together and jamming once a week. Geoff [Rickly, singer in Thursday and producer of 'I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love'] kept telling us how great we were and he always said that we were going to be huge, and I didn't believe him of course, but it felt good that at least people believed in _us_."

After the release of their first full-length, My Chemical Romance got out on the road and roamed the East coast, and as the message of their music started spreading through America members of the band found it difficult to keep in touch with their loved ones at home, and it slowly wore them down.

"I didn't have a cell phone," Way laughs. "This was 2002, and I didn't have a fucking cell phone. It was ridiculous. My girlfriend at the time wasn't very happy about it, and she broke up with me when I came back from tour on a short break once, because she couldn't deal with not being able to keep in touch and we didn't let family or friends or girlfriends or whatever tour with us, because our van was cramped and there was never enough space in there for us, let alone for other people."

When I ask him how he handled the break up, he looks contemplative for a second, before shaking his head.

"I don't think I really handled it at all, really. I didn't really need to." 

He pauses. 

"We weren't exactly made for each other. When MCR first went on tour away from everybody, I realized that I had maybe just used her as a substitute for everything that I didn't have. I had so desperately wanted someone close to me, someone to talk to that I hadn't really reflected over _who_ I wanted there. I didn't have a lot of friends; there was Mikey, but unlike me, he had a social life and didn't always have time for his socially retarded older brother. And then when MCR got off the ground and we all grew closer to each other as a band, I realized that I really hadn't understood before that I loved having friends. And I think my girlfriend had been there for me when I didn't have anyone else, but what it came down to was that really I hadn't been making a conscious choice to be with her; I just took what little I could get."

While Gerard struggled to keep his relationship at bay and failed doing so, other members of the band didn't have the same problems. Guitarist Frank Iero was in a happy relationship with his high school sweetheart Jamia Nestor, and Gerard remembers the two being everything that he wasn't.

"I was a bit jealous of their relationship," he admits. "They were so young, and yet their love was so domestic and somehow weirdly platonic in a way that I had never experienced. I didn't really think that I would ever _get_ to experience that kind of love either, and I couldn't understand why some people got to be loved like that and some people didn't." 

He takes a contemplative sip of his cappuccino, and looks a little hesitant to continue, eyeing my tape-recorder nervously.

"Around that time was when I maybe started seeing everything a little differently as well," he says tentatively. "I started to realize that I wasn't exactly..." 

He pauses and starts over. 

"I wasn't all happy for Frank to share that kind of love with someone. And while before I had thought that maybe the reason I felt that way was because I just wanted to _be_ him in a way, it started to feel like maybe that wasn't the real reason after all." 

He stops, and takes a huge gulp of his coffee, gnawing on his bottom lip nervously before continuing. 

"It felt crazy at the time, but it became more and more obvious to me that I might have had sort of a... I don't know, I guess you could say..." 

He stops again, and glares at the tape-recorder. 

"Oh, fuck it, I had a fucking crush on Frank and it sucked." 

He looks away quickly and I see a blush burning on his cheeks, and it's obvious that this isn't something that was easy for him to go through. I wait in silence for him to continue, taking small sips of my latte. After a while, he turns back to me, and I see agony shining in his old worn eyes.

"I hadn't ever liked a guy before. Hell, I hadn't even been _attracted_ to a guy ever before. And then suddenly I have this new best friend that I share everything with, talk about everything with and fall asleep on every night, and one morning I wake up and realize that this guy _rocks_ my fucking _world_. I was terrified."

Way's newfound discovery made him slowly withdraw from his bandmates, and he often found himself sitting alone in the van just boozing up, because the thoughts in his head weren't easy to deal with.

"I just drank. That was the solution to everything at the time. I wanted to be alone, and at the same time I didn't, because when I was alone my head took over, and my head wasn't always the most pleasant company to be in. So in order to shut out my conscience and my guilt, I resorted to booze and pills. It was the only way to keep the truth away from myself."

The years went by, and as the crush grew into something bigger and more difficult to handle, so did his addiction to the drugs and alcohol, and so did the band. By the time My Chemical Romance had put out their second album, Gerard Way was a wreck. During the recording of 'Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge', his much beloved grandmother had passed away, which left a huge impact on Gerard. The recording process became a rollercoaster of feelings, and Gerard couldn't quite cope with everything.

"When grandma died, I think that was the turning point for what that record was going to be. I had already been a pretty sad guy, but when she passed, I was miserable. There was no going back. And I think what was so hard was that Frankie was always so close. He was the perfect best friend, always comforting me and always staying awake with me when I couldn't sleep. He was just always there, and it didn't help at all. I just fell harder and harder, and I just couldn't let him find out, you know? I had to keep it hidden, because I didn't want to ruin anything, I didn't want him to hate me, I didn't want the band to break up. And I couldn't really talk to anyone else about it either, because I didn't think they'd be very happy with me if they found out... Obviously bottling it all up inside like that wasn't the best solution, but I didn't really think I had any options."

Gerard grew closer and closer to Bert McCracken, singer in The Used, who he had gotten to know when they toured together in 2003. My Chemical Romance and The Used were later booked together on Warped Tour in 2004, and Gerard found McCracken's company a good way of escaping.

"He had the means," Way says reluctantly. "He had what I knew would make me forget, if only for a little while, and I thought it was worth it. I don't know if I really _liked_ him... I liked his connections, his drug dealers, and I liked how easily he could get me what I needed, but the guy was an asshole. We weren't even really friends; we didn't help each other out, we didn't talk about anything, I didn't call him when I needed support. We really just got high together and that was that. He was actually the only one who knew about how I felt about Frank; I had made a couple of pretty embarrassing drunken confessions to him and thankfully he never told anyone else, so there must have been at least _something_ decent in him. He mocked me for it, all the time, but it wasn't like I could just walk out and never speak to him again, because he had a catch on me, he knew something absolutely no one else did, and it was a secret that absolutely could not get out, so I was stuck."

As fans started to clue in on the two singers' special friendship, rumors started to go around that perhaps their relationship exceeded what would be considered 'friendly'. Though neither of them minded, and while the rumors were most amusing to McCracken, Gerard felt more like it was another way of escaping the truth that he was so afraid would come out.

"I think Bert thought it was funny," he says thoughtfully. "He made a joke out of it, and would do things, I don't know, like make out with me when he got drunk just for laughs. I didn't really care; I _embraced_ those rumors, because anything that wasn't a rumor about me liking Frank was a victory. And it felt like if the world thought I was into someone that wasn't Frank, then so would my band think. It felt like a simple way of hiding everything."

As the tour went on, Gerard's drug addiction became more and more severe, and he was slowly slipping into a depression again. Rock star life had taken its toll on him, and he wandered around in a constant state of drug-induced melancholia.

"I was ready to off myself," he sighs. "I was self-harming, not only through drugs and booze but through physical violence as well. The band was getting so big so fast, and I couldn't cope. In some ways I felt like I was still that twenty year old fuck-up in my mom's basement boozing up by myself because I couldn't stand the world outside. We were forced to grow up and I just couldn't. No one really noticed, because everyone were huge drinkers back then, and it became normal to everyone, like it was just something I did. But I guess after a while they started realizing that the problem wasn't just the drinking, I think they started to see that I really really didn't feel very well."

Soon his problems became impossible to ignore, and with a lot of help from his band and their manager, Way slowly started cleaning up. He went from a suicidal wreck to completely sober in a matter of seventeen days, and when we talk about it it's easy to tell how proud he is of himself.

"I could never have done it without the band," he smiles. "It was scary, it was horrific. We were in Japan playing Summer Sonic when I decided to stop, and the plane ride home was just awful. The abstinence was the worst thing I have ever felt to this day. I was shaking and sweating and I couldn't breathe, couldn't sleep... Mikey was scared and wouldn't look at me, and the others I guess weren't really sure of what would happen, they didn't really talk to me, I guess we were all just scared. I didn't even know if I would still be alive by the time we hit the ground. I think we were all pretty worn out, and our drummer at the time, Matt [Pelissier], he wasn't really supportive... We had all gotten in a huge fight because, I don't know, he didn't think I was worth saving or whatever, and as soon as the plane landed back in the States he was out of the band. Nobody wanted him there."

Way's new sobriety soon became word on everyone's lips, both in the media and among the fans, and while most his friends were proud of him and happy for him, Bert McCracken didn't approve.

"I don't know what his problem was," Gerard says, an eyebrow quirked as if in disbelief. "He wouldn't speak to me, and when I finally got a hold of him after like, a couple of weeks of silence he just yelled at me over the phone for fifteen minutes about how I was an asshole for 'selling out and leaving him behind' and he said he would tell the entire world about my feelings for Frank just to get back at me. I think maybe he was a bit jealous that I had sobered up, because I think even back then he had a sense that he would never be able to do that. And it felt weird speaking to him, because I just realized how far away from each other we had always been. We really had nothing in common anymore, now that the booze and drugs were out of the equation."

This resulted in a falling out between the two, and McCracken spent a good deal of the rest of his career throwing shit at Gerard and My Chemical Romance, and, according to popular beliefs, even took to writing an angry, spiteful song about him; 'Pretty Handsome Awkward', featured on the band's third album, 'Lies for the Liars', released in 2007. McCracken later denied those rumors, stating that he "couldn't give less of a shit about My Chemical Romance". Other incidents include him standing with a megaphone by a queue to a My Chemical Romance show and trying to get their fans to go away, and bringing up a fan-made sign saying "FUCK MCR" on stage during a show.

"I don't understand why he made such a big deal out of what happened, and I've never missed him," says Gerard, and he sounds firm and secure. "He belongs to a part of my past that I'm not particularly proud of or happy with, and we weren't even that close to begin with. He couldn't deal with me being happy, and that's his problem."

Bert McCracken went on living a risky, dangerous life, and as he never succeeded in fighting his addictions, he died after an overdose in 2021, thirty nine years old. Gerard's eyes narrow when I mention it, and he shakes his head quickly, as if to clear his head. 

"I kind of knew that it would happen," he says almost sadly, looking down on the table, fingers playing with a paper napkin. "He never wanted to get better, he _wanted_ to be wasted. So I'm not surprised. But what's scary to me is..." 

He trails off, taking a thoughtful sip of his coffee. When he looks back up at me, his eyes are a little wet. 

"It could have been me. It could just as well have been me, if my band hadn't been there for me like they were. And it scares me, it really does." 

He pauses. 

"What bothers me about it though is that people worshiped him like he was Kurt Cobain after he died," he says, eyes darkened. "He was no Kurt Cobain, I can tell you that. He didn't contribute with anything. It's weird how you can be a complete asshole and live the most tragic and awful life and do loads of shit to other people and completely throw away your life, and then when you die you'll get raised to the sky like you were the biggest hero there was. I just don't understand why."

  


**Chapter Two: Carrying On**  


'The Black Parade', released on Reprise Records in 2006, was the album that changed everything for My Chemical Romance. Taking on a new side of the rock music scene, MCR found themselves bigger and more popular than they had ever been. They toured the world over and over, and fans seemed to never get enough. Though the hectic lifestyle of a world famous band wore them out, and while the aftermath of the record was hard, the process of making it was even harder.

In early 2006, the band locked themselves in at a haunted mansion in Los Angeles; the Paramour, and they didn't come out for two whole months. In there, they focused on their third full-length, and spent day and night writing songs and creating concepts. While in the mansion, creepy things started happening to them, and they found themselves slowly going insane.

"Doors would slam in your face, water would randomly start running. There was something about Mikey's room that really freaked him out, and he would sneak into my room in the middle of the night and just sleep on the floor because he couldn't stand being on his own," Way recalls somewhat somberly. "It was hard, we were going mad in there and we couldn't do anything about it. I was having these sort of nightmares, but they were way too vivid to be dreams. I was suffocating, and I could see bodies burning, my best friends, my family. Someone was choking me, I could feel their hands on my throat, and I couldn't get away. It happened every fucking night for a while there."

These nightly 'terrors', as he calls them himself, inspired him to write the song 'Sleep', track number ten on 'The Black Parade'. He wasn't the only one in the band experiencing odd things in the house; Mikey felt the house slowly suffocating him, and took to alcohol and antidepressants just to get away from the eerie feel of the place. However, after some time the pressure proved too much for him, and feeling completely disconnected from the band and the record and the jam sessions they had planned, and according to himself even from _life_ in itself, it began to dawn on him and the others that in order to survive, he needed to get out.

"Mikey really struggled to keep sane," Gerard explains in a pained voice. "He was always crying, and I couldn't reach him, nobody could. He didn't let anyone in. I didn't realize it at the time, but he had been doing drugs and he'd been drinking a lot and I don't know, I just didn't see it. He wanted to die, he told me, and I didn't know what to do. We all decided together that it would be for the best if he left and just relaxed for a while, just to get a grip on whether or not he wanted to do this anymore, and he took off the next day. I didn't know if he would come back, if he still wanted to be in the band, if he was going to be alive by the time we got out of the mansion... I just knew that he couldn't be there."

Well away from the Paramour, Mikey stayed with the band's attorney, Stacy Fass. She put him in therapy programs and helped him cope with his depression, and after some time of seeing four different doctors a week, Mikey was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. With help from Fass and his therapists, much like his brother he kicked the destructive habits and started to function normally again, safely away from the Paramour and the pressure. However, back at the Paramour, Gerard and the rest of the band struggled with the creative stasis they found themselves in.

"I was so angry," he says, and he sounds a bit guilty. "With myself, with the band, with everyone... We weren't writing anymore, we weren't even talking to each other. Sometimes, people wouldn't even come out of their rooms for days, it was horrible. We didn't eat, didn't shower, didn't really breathe... There was this swimming pool in the backyard, and I just wanted to dive straight into it and never rise to the surface again."

MCR's first relapse into songwriting during Mikey's absence resulted in a slightly schizophrenic, angry first version of 'Famous Last Words'. Though when Mikey came back to the mansion's studio, but didn't stay to live with the others in the house, the song was rewritten into an anthem of hope and triumph. And with Mikey back on track songs started flowing again, and they wrote like never before. Soon they felt confident enough to track, and as soon as that decision had been made they left the mansion, never to come back.

"I think we left ghosts of ourselves behind in there," muses Gerard. "We really were the ghosts for a while, when Mikey was gone. We were haunting the place, and I think maybe we still are. I don't know why, but it was difficult to leave. It hurt even though I knew I never wanted to set my foot in there again."

When the band had left the Paramour, Frank Iero wasted no time in proposing to his girlfriend, Jamia Nestor. They threw an engagement party in Los Angeles, and Gerard recalls that attending was difficult for him.

"I wanted to be happy for them, I really did," he sighs. "They had me design the cake for the party, and I did it though it was hard. I had come to grips with the fact that it wasn't just a crush anymore, I actually loved him, and it hurt to see him love somebody else like that. And it was hard because Jamia is amazing, and I love her, she's a great person, I've always thought so. It would have been easier to hate her, I guess, but how could I ever do that?"

After 'The Black Parade' had been released My Chem were flying all across the world for the first time, touring places they had never been before, and Gerard announced his engagement to one of the band's make up artists, Eliza Cuts. However the engagement didn't last long, and only a few months after the announcement the two broke up. Though the break up with Cuts is something he would rather not get into details on, Gerard still offers an explanation as to why that happened.

"I was desperate," he says about the sudden change of heart. "I thought since Frankie was settling down, if I did too then I would forget all about him and I would feel at home. But it didn't work. She wasn't right for me, and I don't think I was the right guy for her either, and I'm glad we broke up before we got married. It would have been so much more difficult if we had had to deal with legal issues on top of everything... We were better off the way it happened."

During the late summer in 2007 My Chem joined Linkin Park on their tour 'Projekt Revolution', which took them all across America. With them came the likes of Taking Back Sunday, HIM, The Bled and Mindless Self Indulgence (the last of which later on had an interesting impact on Gerard), and it was, to say the least, an eventful month-and-a-half. Many have agreed that Projekt Revolution was the high-point in My Chemical Romance's career, and Gerard agrees that it was a special tour.

"Projekt Revolution was in many ways the most fun I've had," he smiles, remembering his glory days fondly. "I don't think I've ever allowed myself to be as crazy as I was back then."

And crazy he was indeed, much because of the obvious chemistry between him and Iero that sparked during that time. They became known to put on a sexy stunt show in protection of their gay fans, and rarely a show went by without the two touching each other, often sensually and daringly. Many believed that this was because of nothing but the need to make a statement against homophobia, but others had a sense that perhaps there was something else lying behind their actions. Rumors flew around the internet, and their popularity in the fan fiction scene grew immensely.

"It started because of homophobia," Way admits, "but it continued because I wanted it to. It felt intoxicating in a way; I was finally getting something, a small part of him, and even though it was nowhere near enough I cherished it and I didn't want it to stop. And I thought, because we were getting even closer to each other as friends too, that maybe things were starting to happen between us. I had a feeling, a selfish and hopeful feeling, but a feeling nonetheless, that he maybe was starting to feel the same for me as I did for him. So I felt the need to constantly challenge him; I _needed_ to be sexy and flirtatious and over the top, just to see how he would react. Every show I had to do something, it didn't always have to involve him, but I needed to push some boundaries and do something hot, like flirt with the boys in the crowd, talk about sucking cock, touch myself, _anything_ , just to see if he would laugh at me or stare in awe."

And did he laugh, I ask?

Gerard pauses thoughtfully. "I don't know. I don't think so. He would usually play along, I didn't always start everything, you know."

The most significant and controversial of the by the fans so called 'stagegay' events occurred on the tour, was a kiss shared between Way and Iero in San Bernardino on July 28th. It caused much surprise among the fans, and only fueled the outlandish rumors about the two. Gerard smiles when I mention it, and though they had kissed on stage before, none of the other stagekisses had ever caused such frenzy among the fans, and that moment became crucial for the fans in defining their relationship as friends and bandmates.

"I remember that," Gerard smiles and gulps down some coffee. "It was three days in on the tour, we were psyched about playing, and we had been kind of flirting all day. It was a complicated situation, he was being confusing and too sweet and he was making innuendos and dirty jokes and, like, hugged me all the time, but as always, nothing felt complicated once we had hit the stage. Up there, it was just me, him, and a hell of a good time, and crossing the stage to kiss him wasn't difficult to do at all. I didn't have to make a decision about it, I just did it. He wiped his blood on my face and it was like a dare, he was telling me to top that, and I did. We didn't talk about it after the show, but we kept really close to each other as we watched the tape of the set and it was electric. We sat together, the five of us, in the dressing room after the show and Frank and I sat next to each other on a couch just watching. Our thighs and sides were pressing together and we were hot and sweaty and I was so fucking nervous, and at some point, a few songs into the set he did that corny pretend-to-yawn-in-order-to-put-arm-around-someone thing," Gerard laughs. 

However fun and flirty the two young men were getting over each other, there were other things equally confusing that interfered with everything. Frank was quite obviously engaged, and in the band Mindless Self Indulgence a certain bassist was taking a liking to Gerard. 

"Lindsey," he smiles and subconsciously twirls his wedding ring around his finger. "She started to flirt with me a lot those first few days of tour, and I don't think I necessarily always realized that she did. I was too wrapped up in being pathetically in love with my guitarist," he laughs. "But we became really close friends, and as things became less flirty and more honest with her, I actually started opening up about stuff. She obviously noticed that I wasn't really into all her flirting or whatever, and she actually called me on it once and wanted to know what was up, and I ended up telling her all about Frank. And maybe that wasn't the smartest thing, considering how things ended up later on, but I actually considered her my best friend at that point and it felt good to finally tell someone about it. And she listened and cared, and she was actually _happy_ for me when I told her that something awesome had happened, and she held me every night when I was sad about Frankie gushing to me about how amazing Jamia was. I didn't really think about it, I guess I just figured she quickly got over her small, tiny, _microscopic_ crush on me as soon as she found out that I was into a guy."

Unfortunately, things weren't quite that easy. As the tour went on, the relationship between Gerard and Frank became difficult to handle. On stage they were okay, and would rub up against each other like horny teenagers, but off stage things were more complicated. One day they would be flirty and close and overly friendly with each other, and the next day they would be completely awkward in each other's company, and Gerard had a hard time dealing with it. He went to Lindsey for support, and though he didn't notice it at the time, by doing so he only fueled her feelings for him.

"It was such a mess," he groans, burying his face in his hands. "Frankie would be so completely different from day to day, and it was exhausting. He'd be cuddling up to me on the couch and, like, falling asleep on top of me, and then the next day he wouldn't even look me in the eye, he'd pretend we didn't know each other. And what's more is he was constantly on the phone with Jamia, they were planning their wedding and I felt like I was constantly in the way, because he was always so excited about the wedding and I must have killed his spirit a little bit every time he came to me to ramble about it, I guess, because I could never feign excitement very well. And, on top of everything, this crush that Lindsey had on me was starting to become evident again, but I never spoke to her about it. I pretended like I didn't notice, and still constantly went to her to cry on her shoulder."

As tension grew between Gerard and Frank, their antics during the stage shows became less fun and playful and instead more angst-ridden and angry. They both found it difficult to read one another, and by the end of the tour the anxiety proved too much for Gerard, who decided to confront his friend about it.  


"I shouldn't have talked to him about it, I guess, but it was all just too much," Gerard explains. "I couldn't deal with being kept in the dark like that, and I was angry with him for not seeing how much he hurt me. So I just went up to him and I told him that I thought he was being confusing and weird, and that if he cherished our friendship then he would stop fucking with me and leave me alone." 

He laughs bitterly, and takes a sip of his coffee. 

"He told me I was an asshole," Way continues, "and he promised he'd back off, and I guess he thought I was talking about what had been going on on stage, because I hadn't even really told him what the problem _really_ was. But anyway, what happened is he _didn't_ back off, not at _all_ , so I snapped. We were playing and he had been keeping his place, staying at his side of the stage through the entire set, and then for some fucking reason that I do not understand, in the middle of the set he just decided to walk straight up to me, stand on my monitor and, like, _hug_ me, as if nothing had fucking happened. I... shit, I just _lost_ it. I can't remember quite what happened, but I think I threw him down and we wrestled each other for a while, and in the end he fell to the floor and I... I kicked him over. And then I threw a water bottle at him." 

He rolls his eyes.

"Mature, right? But I just couldn't help it, I was so fucking mad at him. It was awful, and then we had the biggest of fights when we got off the stage. We were yelling and screaming and throwing things and saying horrible things to each other, and in the end he left the dressing room we were in saying 'If you don't want me around, then stop fucking acting like I'm the most amazing thing in the world, because it's obvious to me now that you're just so full of shit and you don't even mean it anyway', and then he slammed the door."

He pauses and takes a huge gulp of his cappuccino, and his fingers tremble as they clutch the cup like it is a lifeline to hold on to.

"I guess maybe I should have realized," Gerard continues quietly, and I can almost hear the lump in his throat, "that what he said meant that he saw that he was the most amazing thing in the world to me, and that he _liked_ it, that he _wanted_ me to feel that way, because otherwise he wouldn't have stayed so sweet and so friendly towards me, but I heard nothing in his words but 'I hate you, Gerard, I wish you were dead'." 

He shakes his head and laughs sadly. 

"And that was the end of it; we didn't touch after that, we didn't go near each other. We almost didn't speak for several days, and when we _did_ , it was useless pathetic small talk. It hurt me so much to not be able to even be his best friend anymore, but we were both too stubborn, I guess, to really do anything about it."

Gerard went to Lindsey for support and consolation, and came to an impulsive decision that would change everything.

"That night, after the fight, Lindsey had to comfort me 'cause I was in hysterics," he recalls. "I just broke down on her, and she held me and told me it would be alright. She had been watching the show when it happened, and I think she understood far more than what I told her, because I wasn't calm enough to even form words. She stayed up with me that night, and we sat in her bunk in her bus and just talked all night, and when I cried she dried my tears and held my hand until it stopped hurting. She told me that love would come along and that Frankie would realize his mistake and that I would find someone to be happy with, and for some reason, in that moment, I wanted it to be her. I told her that I wanted to be happy with her, because she was my best friend and I loved her and I knew that she would make me happy."

He smiles, and thoughtfully twirls a strand of his hair around his fingers.

"I don't think I've ever seen her that happy as she was in that moment, if you don't count when Bandit was born. She beamed at me and told me that I was her best friend, and that was it, we were lost. Being in a relationship with her wasn't difficult, I didn't even have to pretend to love her, because she's such an easy person to be around, she made me so happy. Frankie wouldn't talk to me about her or about anything really, and I guess I thought that he didn't really care... So I decided that the only way to fully get over Frankie was to completely tie myself to someone else. Two weeks later I married Lindsey backstage, and it was a bit difficult but at the same time it felt so liberating. It didn't help at all in terms of getting over Frankie, but it helped in terms of making me less lonely and sad."

Their wedding took place backstage after the last show of the Projekt Revolution tour, and the ceremony was small and low-key, the couple wearing matching t-shirts with printed unicorns on. Iero served as the wedding photographer, taking pictures with his camera phone, and Gerard remembers only telling him about the wedding plans a mere hour before the ceremony was starting.

"He didn't really say anything," he shrugs. "He was surprised, of course, and I think he managed to get out a 'congratulations', but his smile was weird and looked plastic, and I had a feeling that he wasn't exactly happy about it. But at least he didn't object, and that was enough for me to go through with it."

A few months later, Frank married his Jamia. And with both Frank and Gerard happily married their friendship worked itself out again, and the fights were long forgotten.

"His wedding was beautiful," Gerard smiles, though I detect a little jealousy in his eyes. "It was nice, because you're totally allowed to cry at weddings, right? So everyone cried and I did too, and I guess everyone else thought I was crying because I was so happy for him, but of course that wasn't the reason. I felt so bad, because there I was, at my best friend's wedding and instead of being happy that he got what he wanted, all I could think about was everything I was missing out on. God, I felt like such a terrible person."

  


**Chapter Three: Taking a Break**  


After the success that was Projekt Revolution ended, the band shook off their costumes and went on tour again, though this time not as an alter ego band; but as themselves. Not anymore held back by the personas and the bleak story 'The Black Parade' forced them to tell, they felt free to do whatever they wanted, but the scene they put on had already worn them out. And after a completely mind blowing, life changing last show at Madison Square Garden in May 2008, the band called it a day and went on a break, and no one knew when or if they would come back.

"The Black Parade killed us," Gerard sighs. "That's really what happened. We were sick of touring, sick of the songs, sick of the costumes, and we had really forgotten how to live. As soon as we'd said goodbye to each other outside of Madison that night, we were off on our different paths and we didn't really know if we would play together again. We really just needed to get back on track, and learn again how to be normal. I'd forgotten how to drive a car, how to go to the supermarket, how to cook... Everything was crazy. Me and Lindsey moved to L.A. and settled down, and after a while I started to really get into that whole sort of domestic living. It was awesome."

Though did he not miss his bandmates and friends, I wonder?

"Of course I did," he shrugs. "I didn't really miss playing, at least not at first, but I definitely missed the guys. But Mikey moved down after a while and then so did Ray, and Bob came down from time to time so it wasn't really all that bad. The only one I never really saw was Frankie, and obviously that sucked, but he was on tour all the time and he never really went home."

Iero joined the New Jersey based hardcore group Leathermouth in 2008, and went on tour almost immediately after MCR had gone on hiatus. 

"I don't know how he did it," Gerard says, clearly a little baffled. "I don't know how he had the energy to just go out and do that all over again. He just never stopped. The rest of us went on a break from tour to take it easy, live a normal life, try something else, be with our families... But he went on a break from tour to _tour_. And though I couldn't believe why he would do that, and I honestly was a little jealous that he was doing it with other people and not _me_ , I still loved that about him. He just loved to play so much, and he could never stop. He just never got tired of being on stage and he had so much energy. I came out to watch a couple of the shows they played, and he nailed it. Watching him be a frontman was amazing. He really shines when he's on stage, and it was weird standing there _watching_ it, when I was used to getting to _share_ that with him."

While Iero lived it up on the road, Gerard spent his free time in sunny Los Angeles making art and writing comics, and in 2008 the second series of 'The Umbrella Academy' premiered, entitled 'Dallas'. Its prequel, 'Apocalypse Suite' won an Eisner Award that year, and the pressure was high on Gerard to produce a second series as successful as the first one had been.

"I didn't know if I'd come back to music or not," he explains, "so I kind of thought I needed to not screw the whole comic thing up again, because I thought I could have a career as a comic book writer if I just kept it up. I'd already failed a career in illustrating and I didn't want to end up like that again, because I didn't know what was happening with My Chem and I had a baby on the way and obviously I needed to provide for my family, you know? So I put everything into those comics because it was all I had at the time."

In 2009, the band had been away from each other a long time and it started to feel like they should try something new, and Gerard was contacted by Zack Snyder, director for the movie ‘Watchmen’ regarding the movie’s soundtrack. Snyder wanted My Chemical Romance to record a song for the soundtrack, and they chose an old classic by Bob Dylan; ‘Desolation Row’.

“The ‘Desolation’ project was fun, because we got to play in a studio again and that was the first time we even played together for maybe a year,” Gerard smiles. “I did a rough arrangement of the song as soon as I’d gotten off the phone with Zack, and we kind of gave it a violent punk sound which we were all very excited about. The video was a lot of fun as well, Zack directed it and we gathered all these punk looking kids in an old abandoned theater and just played the most violent show I can remember us ever doing. There were cops and drunken fights and we were wounded and ragged and it was awesome.”

The song peaked at number 20 on the Billboard chart list for modern rock songs in March, 2009, and the band lay low for a few months after that.

“We took a break again because my baby was coming,” Gerard says with a smile, “but we kept in touch and we practiced a few times, but we couldn’t really book anything or make any decisions before my baby was born, because we didn’t know how fatherhood would affect me.”

And in May, 2009, Bandit Lee Way was born into the Way household. Gerard’s eyes well up a little when we talk about it, and he admits that Bandit being born was the best thing that could have happened to him.

“She was so beautiful, so perfect,” he sighs with a dreamy smile. “And it was scary, because I had never been a father before, but somehow it felt so _right_ and it just made us perfect. Our little family wasn’t something that I could question anymore, and it felt like me being with Lindsey was just meant to be and it actually made me yearn for Frankie a little less. Bandit came into my life as a distraction and a wake up call, and I didn’t have time to think about anything else. She was suddenly the centre of the universe and though we had shows coming up and a record starting to form in our heads nothing really mattered because all I wanted was to be home with her and Lindsey.”

But duty called, and as the months went on and the baby grew older it started to dawn on Gerard and the rest of the band that they had things to do and simply couldn’t let the break continue.

“We were booked to headline Summer Sonic Festival in Japan in August,” he explains, “and we were nervous because we obviously hadn’t played a show in over a year, since Madison [Square Garden]. So we simply needed to practice, and it was weird leaving home and going to work every day because I just wanted to be with my daughter, but at the same time spending time with the band again was so much fun and it kind of rekindled that little spark between Frank and me.”

He pauses thoughtfully. 

“Or maybe the spark was just between _me_. I’m not sure Frank felt it too.” 

He laughs and takes a sip of his cappuccino, smiling at me over the rim of his coffee mug. 

“But it was great to be with my best friends again and though part of me just wanted to stay home and play with Bandit another part of me just wanted to play, so being away from her during the days really wasn’t so bad.”

The band booked a couple of secret, small shows in L.A. in a small venue called The Roxy, and let fans win tickets through a competition with the radio station KROQ. The shows were an immediate success, and the band was welcomed with warmth back to the scene. Well prepared for headlining such a huge festival, the band was shipped over to Japan to play one of the biggest shows of their lives, and Gerard remembers how nervous they all were with a smile.

“Last time we played Summer Sonic I disappeared under the stage in the middle of the show, puking my guts out,” he laughs, if not a bit bitter. “So I really was anxious not to mess it up again. And it was the first time since Bandit was born that I had to leave her, and I really really missed her a lot and it felt weird, going away from her and Lindsey. The others brought their wives and Lindsey was the only one who stayed home, and it was as if there was a piece of me missing. I was psyched to be playing, but I really wanted to go home.”

The show went great, and they were all very happy with how it turned out, and on the plane home Gerard felt as though he had overcome a great obstacle.

“Last time we played Summer Sonic,” he begins a little hesitantly, “I messed up big time. Last time we played Summer Sonic, we lost one of our own. It was scary to be sitting on the plane home and feeling accomplished, when really I thought there was some kind of jinx to the whole festival, that something was bound to go wrong.”

And Gerard was right, in a way. Summer Sonic Festival 2004 was Matt Pelissier’s last show as a member of My Chemical Romance. Summer Sonic Festival 2009, though they did not know that at the time, was going to be Bob Bryar’s last show as well as a member of the band. Gerard tenses when I mention it.

“I honestly think that was why we never played Summer Sonic again,” he says. “We just couldn’t deal with having to go through that again. Even though Bob didn’t leave directly after Summer Sonic, like Matt had, when we got back into the studio after Japan we could all feel that something had changed.”

The band spent the next few months in the studio, recording their fourth album. However their creative juices just weren’t flowing, and something wasn’t quite right. My Chem were scheduled to play a couple of shows in Australia in February 2010, but the shows were cancelled due to unforeseen problems with Gerard’s voice, or so the fans were told.

“There was no problem with my voice,” Gerard admits. “We had started discussing whether or not we were doing the right thing, if we were making the right record, and Bob had already decided that he was leaving. We couldn’t play the shows without a drummer, and to be honest we were all heartbroken to see him go, but we couldn’t tell the fans the truth because it wasn’t official yet. So we made up a rumor that I had lost my voice and was unable to sing, and then in March we dropped the real bomb.”

It was a sad time for the MCRmy, only having gotten bad news from the band or quite some time. First the cancelled shows, then the lost drummer. There was an uproar and Bob Bryar went underground to shield himself from raging fans with questions. Gerard still doesn’t want to reveal to me why Bryar and the band parted ways, but he admits it had a lot to do with drive.

“He just wasn’t eager for this record the way we were,” he says and refuses to speak about it more.

  


**Chapter Four: Dangerous Days Arising**  


With the loss of their drummer, My Chem scrapped almost the entire record they had been recording only weeks before it was scheduled to be released, and they took a short break from each other to clear their heads. Right about then was also when Frank decided to drop a bigger bomb on the band and their fanbase; he and Jamia were going to be parents of twins. Gerard, who tried to be supportive and happy for them, needed to get away to clear his head, and he rented a house in the California desert with his wife and child. There he had an epiphany.

“I was angry and sad,” he explains, “because I had lost one of my best friends and we didn’t know what we were going to do about the band. And to top it off Frank was going to have children and I was just so jealous of Jamia, because children is obviously the one thing I would never be able to give him, and everything was just really hard and I was tempted to make an angst-ridden, dark and gloomy record again because everything in my life was just so black, but when we were in the desert I just realized that the record wasn’t going to be about that at all. It was going to be about making it, surviving, about sticking up for yourself and your friends.”

Gerard wrote a song; ‘Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)’, and called up the rest of the band, telling them all about what he had realized. He went back home with his family again to play and write, and once the band had gotten back on track again they made a decision to reconnect with an old friend; Rob Cavallo who had produced ‘The Black Parade’.

“Previously, we had some sort of a thing going on about never using the same producer twice,” Gerard explains, “but as we got into writing for the second time we realized how stupid that was. Rob was ultimately the one person we all trusted and felt comfortable with, and it only felt like the right thing to do to contact him again.”

Cavallo agreed to produce their album, and with him on board the production came along greatly, without any further problems for the band. They were all excited to be back in the studio, and with a conscious decision not to fight the songs anymore the creative juices were flowing like never before. 

“People were trying out new things,” Gerard remembers. “We were playing all sorts of different instruments, creating sounds that we had never even gone near before, doing stuff we had previously shied away from. We started to realize that we just wanted to have fun, so that’s what we tried to do. We would just play around in the studio, laughing and joking, and nothing was impossible. Whenever anyone had an idea, we just went and tried it.”

Right in the final stages of recording, Iero went back home to New Jersey to take care of his wife who was just about ready to give birth. Gerard remembers the phone call he got during the labor with a smile.

“I just couldn’t be jealous or angry anymore,” he sighs. “Frankie called me in the middle of everything, and it felt so unbelievably great that I was the first person he had thought of to let know. It was in the middle of the night and he was crying, I could hear Jamia scream and shout in the background and then suddenly, everything stopped into silence and there was the sound of a baby crying. I just lost it. It was such an amazing moment, and I was so glad I had gotten to share that with Frankie. We hung up right when the second baby was about to be born, and I just couldn’t stop shaking. I was so happy for them.”

Lily Bloom and Cherry Blossom Iero came into the world with a bang, and the band all went upstate after a couple of weeks to meet the new family.

“They were beautiful,” Gerard says with a smile. “They were so unbelievably gorgeous and perfect and when I held them for the first time, everything just clicked. I realized that this was how it was supposed to be; they were supposed to be a family and nothing I could do or say could ever change that. And I was okay with that.”

While Frank stayed at home, taking care of his family, the rest of the band set to work again, getting the word of the record out there. They decided they didn’t want to just release the record; they wanted to make it special. Mysterious twitter accounts and alter egos were the solution.

The characters AgentCherriCola, DrDeathDefying, NewsAGoGo, PartyPoison, DJHotCHIMP and TommyChowMein – to name only a few – started to roam the web, contacting fans firsthand and posting cryptic messages. On the band’s website a page was added, called ‘Transmissions’, on which a TV with a number of different channels was featured. The puzzling, secretive promotion went on for several months, and a number of conspiracy theories started to surface. They regarded everything from nuclear wars to extraterrestrial threats, and while the band were amused they never revealed the true story about the record. That is, until it was released.

On November 22nd, 2010, ‘Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys’ was dropped, to the joy of fans who had been waiting for years for new material from the band. The record peaked at an impressive eighth place on the U.S. Billboard chart, and five singles were released. The band set off on the World Contamination Tour, beginning in the United Kingdom and continuing throughout Northern America, Europe and Asia, and the band were on the road for almost a year. Joining them as their drummer was Michael Pedicone, previously a member of The Bled. Pedicone was also the studio drummer for My Chem’s ‘The Mad Gear and Missile Kid’ EP, co-released with a deluxe edition of ‘Danger Days’, and he was a good friend of the band.

And being back on the road after almost two years of hiatus, was to the band scary but still it felt like a homecoming.

“When we played those first shows of the World Contamination Tour in England, we were all really excited to get back on the stage. It was scary and we weren’t used to it, but I think it was good for us to be a little bit nervous. It reminded us of why we loved doing what we did,” Gerard says.

Where the World Contamination Tour left off, another tour started. My Chemical Romance co-headlined the 10th annual Honda Civic Tour together with Blink-182, and the tour ran through the U.S. from August 5th, 2011, until October 8th. 

“Honda Civic was a fun tour,” he remembers. “At least in the beginning.”

Right in the middle of that tour, the band flew over to England again to headline Reading and Leeds; the iconic festival they had played only once before, and gotten feverishly bottled. But now as they returned, My Chem won the crowd over with an impressive set, and the show in Reading hit an unbelievable high when Brian May [former guitarist in Queen] joined them on stage for an encore of 1977 classic ‘We Will Rock You’.

“That was the ultimate way to finish that show,” Gerard thinks fondly. “We conquered, we showed everyone what we were worth and it was an epic battle to get over the bottling we had endured last time we were there. It felt like the ultimate victory, sharing our stage with a legend.”

An unpleasant surprise shook the band to its core when they returned to the States to play the remainder of the Honda Civic Tour. Drummer Michael Pedicone was caught red-handed, stealing from the band, and he was immediately sacked. The incident was hard on them all, and their trust in their friends began to falter.

“Frankie took it worst,” Gerard sighs. “Pedicone was his best friend, and he betrayed us. We just couldn’t forgive him for what he had done, and it made me and Frankie grow a little bit closer, because he needed someone to care for him and to comfort him, and I of course had to take that opportunity to get to be with him.”

Fans were outraged by what had happened, feeling like the position as a drummer for My Chemical Romance had some sort of jinx to it, and without the fans’ support Pedicone lost his credibility as a musician and never drummed for anyone again, though he tried to remedy his actions by posting an apologetic message on the internet, through the U.K. magazine ‘Kerrang!’. In his place, Jarrod Alexander [former drummer of ‘Death By Stereo’] filled in for the remainder of the tour, and the band made a conscious decision never to ‘get married’ to a drummer again, as they put it.

“The band was from there on only going to consist of me, Frankie, Mikey and Ray,” Gerard says with a stern tone. “There was to be no one else coming in to fuck up with our dynamics, and we were going to be a unit that couldn’t be messed with. We had been fucked over so many times by people, and we just didn’t want to end up in that position again.”

And with that new mindset, the band finished their tour without any further complications. But after a year of constantly flying back and forth over seas to be with their families at home, touring took its toll on the band once again. As soon as Honda Civic Tour was over, they stopped booking shows and took a few months’ break again over Christmas. They were back on the road in late January, 2012; playing the annual festival Big Day Out in New Zealand and Australia for the first time since 2007. Gerard shocked the fans on their first show of the festival, sporting a new, quite interesting hairstyle.

“My hair was orange,” he laughs. “I had just dyed it from bright red back to black, but that got boring after just a couple of weeks so I decided to bleach it again. And then I just really couldn’t decide what color to have, so I just let it be that way.”

After the band had returned home again in early February, Gerard couldn’t bring himself to do anything about his hair, and he simply let it stay as it was.

“Frank had said something in an interview about the next record that really stuck with me,” he explains, “and he said he saw a lot of orange in the direction the band was going in. I think for that reason, it felt like I needed to keep my hair orange because I wanted to align with his creative vision, because he had something interesting going on.”

  


**Chapter Five: Feeling Ready**  


A few weeks after Big Day Out, the band got together again to start writing their next record. They already had material that they had written out on tour, and it didn’t take long for them to find a sound that they were all happy with. Songs started flooding, and they got into the studio after only a couple of months. This time however, they did it a little bit differently.

They rented a studio in the outskirts of Los Angeles and basically locked themselves in there for several months, just working together with the occasional visit of one of their friends, who was doing the drumming. Ray Toro produced and mixed the record all by himself, and it was the first time the band got to really work alone without any interference from other people regarding their work. The only person who worked with them was Doug McKean, their faithful engineer who had worked for them on both ‘The Black Parade’ and ‘Danger Days’.

“It was exciting,” Gerard smiles over the rim of his coffee cup, “to get to work by ourselves. We had gotten a taste of what that was like when we did the ‘Mad Gear [and Missile Kid]’ EP, and we had really missed that so it was fun to just get to make all the decisions ourselves. And everything went by so fast too, it felt like we were really on a roll. We just wanted to get that record out there.”

In March, Frank started a countdown on twitter, which sparked the fans’ attention immediately. No one knew what he was counting down to, and theories and rumors started spreading over the internet. Fans anticipated news, singles, tourdates, anything, and on April 6th, after two weeks of counting down, Frank dropped the bomb on the MCRmy; his wife Jamia had given birth to their first son, Miles.

"They wanted to keep the pregnancy a secret, so while Jamia was pregnant she didn’t come out to do official things with us, they were very careful not to let anyone take pictures of her,” Gerard explains. “And when Miles was born, suddenly our fanbase blew up. I guess it came completely out of the blue for them, because none of us had really given any clues, and we had to take a break from recording and interviewing and stuff for a while because our fans were just crazy over this little boy. Thinking back, I think it might have been better if we had prepared them for what was going to happen, but we did what we thought was the best at the time.”

Prior to Miles’ birth, Frank, Jamia and the twins temporarily moved down to Los Angeles to make the recording process easier, and they stayed there for quite a while. While they were on a break from working, the two families often got together for playdates and barbeques and sleepovers because the children all wanted to spend as much time together as possible.

“They just loved each other,” Gerard recalls with a smile. “The girls were the best of friends, even though Bandit was a couple years older, and they all took care of Miles and wanted to help out with him. So it was only natural to keep our families together, because it was so rare that we were all in the same state at the same time, so we really wanted to make the most of it.”

Gerard mixed songwriting with comicwriting, and a conceptual comic called ‘The True Life of the Fabulous Killjoys’ was released in July. The comic explained further the concept behind their previous record, and told another side of the story about the killjoys. 

“That comic was a lot of fun,” he recalls. “I had been working on it for several years, and when it finally got released it felt so good, like I could finally relax.”

With the comic out of the way, Gerard could focus entirely on the new record. He kept his orange hair throughout the entire recording process, because he felt it was important. And on December 17th, 2012, their fifth full-length ‘The Unspeakable’ was released into the world, with a big orange warning sign on the cover. 

The first single ‘Face The Music’ instantly hit the top of the Billboard chart, however it was one of the other songs that sparked the most interest amongst the fans; the slow power ballad ‘Feeling Ready And Not Knowing (I Love You)’, sounding like a crossover of ‘I Don’t Love You’ from ‘The Black Parade’ and ‘Bulletproof Heart’ from ‘Danger Days’. With lyrics such as “I know I used to sing that I don’t love you / But every word I sang were but a lie” and “I just can’t stand watching you laugh with her / Even though I’m doing just the same / ‘Cause every move you make will cause my heart to burn / Should Cupid really be the one to blame?” fans were beginning to believe that perhaps there was something that the singer wasn’t telling them.

“I should have been more subtle,” Gerard laughs. “I never intended to write a love song about Frank, but it just kind of flowed out and I didn’t think about what I was writing. I realize that pointing out that there’s a ‘her’ I don’t want the object of my affection to laugh with, and saying ‘boy’ at one point in the song probably wouldn’t convince everyone else that I was writing about Lindsey, but it didn’t matter. The entire band loved the song and though I’m fairly sure they understood what it was about they never said anything.”

However it soon dawned on the fans that the first letters in each word in the title together spelled ‘Frank’, and theories started to float on the web about what the song might be about; theories that were quite honestly mostly right.

“It was scary,” Gerard admits, “but I never acknowledged it. We all avoided the questions as much as we could and though the fans really were onto me, I never gave them a direct answer as to what the song was about. And as long as it wasn’t confirmed by us that I had feelings for Frank all the theories could just be regarded as nonsense, and I was so glad that the band stuck up for me, and didn’t rat me out.”

However this controversy proved difficult to get away from, and in order to steer people’s thoughts away from the song My Chem quickly whipped together another full-length while out on tour, and released it with the hopes that it would distract the fans from Gerard and Frank.

‘EXTERMINATE’ was an extension of the ‘Mad Gear and Missile Kid’ EP, complete with fourteen short, angry songs about the fictitious world of 2019; the same concept that ‘Danger Days’ had regarded. Fans were surprised, to say the least, but the record served its purpose and the discussions about Gerard and Frank mostly died down.

The Unplayable Tour went on for two years and took My Chemical Romance through Europe, Asia, North and South America, Australia and they even played in Africa for the first time; a small show at a club in Cape Town, South Africa in August, 2014. 

“That was fun,” Gerard recalls. “It felt like a monumental thing to do, to finally get to play in Africa. Neither of us had ever been there, and it was an overwhelming experience.”

Something else was monumental during that trip as well, something Gerard remembers fondly.

“Frank changed his ringtone while we were there,” he smiles. “He changed it to ‘Feeling Ready’. We never talked about it, he never mentioned it, but that was still so huge and I couldn’t believe that he would do that. It was then that I realized that he really _did_ know what the song was about, and that he didn’t hate me for it. It was then that I realized that I maybe wasn’t the only one feeling like this.”

And about a month later when the band played that song in London, sparks began to fly between Gerard and Frank again. Gerard shifts in discomfort on his seat when I mention it, and a blush starts to stain his cheeks.

“I don’t know why he did it,” he explains warily, “but just as the last notes rung out in the stadium, just as I sang ‘You know it’s true’, he just came straight up to me, tore the microphone from my grip and kissed me.”

The two hadn’t kissed in six years, and though it was unexpected and inappropriate Gerard found himself unable to let go now that he had Frank in his arms again. They kept their lips tightly locked for more than ten seconds, in front of a gaping crowd and a baffled band.

“It was everything I had ever wanted,” Gerard admits, “but it was in public and for the wrong reasons and we weren’t allowed.”

He sighs.

“So I ended it. I had to. It was the only right thing to do. And when I pulled away, he looked at me with this heartbroken shine in his eyes and I felt like such an idiot. He ran away to his side of the stage and played the entire rest of the set with his back turned to me, he didn’t move, didn’t care.”

It was an odd show, to say the least, but the rest of the band tried hard not to let it affect their performance. They had to cut the set short, because Iero stormed away from the stage right in the middle of ‘Summertime’, and Gerard went after him and found him crying in their dressing room.

“He didn’t say anything, he just let me hold him,” Gerard says with a pained expression. “But I understood what it was about, and I felt horrible for putting him through so much shit. I don’t know what it was that hit him that day, we had obviously performed ‘Summertime’ many times before without him reacting, but for some reason that day I guess he just couldn’t cope with hearing me sing about loving someone else. And when I wiped a tear from his face, he kissed me again and I let him.”

He pauses, and I see a shimmering tear slowly fall down his cheek. 

“From there on,” he says shakily, “everything happened pretty quickly. Before I knew what was going on clothes were being ripped off and we ended up fucking against the wall, in a rush because we didn’t know when the others would come in the room. He kissed me and whispered that he loved me, and then when it was over he wouldn’t look me in the eye. We got dressed in silence and I didn’t have a clue of what to do next, I felt dirty and ashamed but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling excited, and happy in a completely wrong way. He left the room, slamming the door behind him without a word, and I cried and called Lindsey.”

He trails off, clutching his coffee cup in shaking hands and eyes my tape recorder sadly, as if speaking straight to it.

“She told me that it was okay,” he continues, “but it wasn’t. I was not fucking okay.”

This incident inevitably made it difficult for the two to continue on as if nothing had happened, so the band cancelled all their booked shows and went on a hiatus after that, because there was so much tension between Gerard and Frank, and it became unbearable for the rest of the guys. Gerard, Ray and Mikey all went home to Los Angeles, and Frank was the only one not to join them. He went back to New Jersey with his wife and children, and for almost a year there was a complete radio silence between him and the rest of the band. And while My Chemical Romance’s future was unclear, Gerard made a decision to start concentrating on his family instead of yearning for someone he would never get. 

“I got more involved with art, and I started my own art gallery in Los Angeles,” he says. “Mikey and Ray and me were still really close, though we didn’t play together much, and that was because we all missed Frankie so much. It was awful, not getting to speak to him, and I felt like such a complete ass for what I had done. I just wanted to apologize, I just wanted to make it right, but I couldn’t reach him.”

Gerard tried to let everything go, and focused on art and comics and writing instead of feeling sorry for himself about Frank. And while that was hard, he started working hard to keep his mind off of things, and released two graphic novels over the course of three months. And in June, 2015 he published his first regular novel; ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. It was a story about a woman who died, and how the man who loved her desperately tried to avenge her by killing off one thousand evil men, in order to bring her back from the dead. The story was deeply inspired by My Chem’s first two concept albums, and Gerard describes it as ‘the story that needed to be written’.

“The story about the Demolition Lovers always needed to be written,” he explains. “A lot of the imagery behind My Chemical Romance’s storytelling was based on their relationship, and they were close to my heart. Because in my eyes, we were always the Demolition Lovers, Frank and I. I was never writing about just any couple, it was us and it was how I felt. The whole concept was about loving someone and having to take to extreme measures in order to get together, and it never worked out in the end. And I felt that now that things had collapsed between Frank and me, the Demolition Lovers’ story really had to be written. There are a lot of metaphors in that book, about Frank and I. I think people kind of realize that when they read the book, but it’s so cleverly disguised that one can never be sure.”

A mere week after the release of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, the phone rang in the Way residence. Bandit, six years old, picked up the phone and shouted in glee through the house, “Daddy, come to the phone!”, happy because she had missed Frank and especially the twins, who she regarded as her little sisters.

“She was so happy when he called,” Gerard remembers with a smile, “and all I could think was ‘Fuck, he has read the book and now he’s calling to tell me that he never wants to see me again’. When Bee gave me the phone I was shaking, so fucking nervous, and then I heard him clear his throat nervously. ‘Gee?’ he asked, and my heart melted. I was so fucking happy to hear his voice again. ‘I read your book,’ he continued, ‘and I’m sorry.’”

  


**Chapter Six: Starting Over**  


That phone call was the beginning of a new era for My Chemical Romance; Frank gathered his wife, children and dogs and moved down permanently to Los Angeles to make it easier to keep the band together. A sort of truce was manifested between Gerard and Frank, a silent agreement to not let their past get in between them, and over all the old feeling of brotherhood slowly came back into the band. And while Gerard was absolutely thrilled that Frank was back in his life, he still found it difficult not to let what had happened between them get to him.

“I was so attracted to him,” he sighs, “and while I hoped and wished that some day that feeling would be gone it was so hard to ignore the fact that every day he was _there_ , right in front of me. It was just the knowing that everything I wanted, I could have, if it weren’t for all these issues and obstacles. I just really wanted to get close to him, but we had to stay civil and it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Rediscovering their old sound and having fun at jam sessions, the band went into the studio in late 2015 to record for the first time since their falling out, in lack of a better word. Their seventh full-length was going to be all about conquering the world, coming out on top of every hardship, and staying afloat when a storm rages the sea around you. Gerard’s lyrics regarded mostly the feeling of losing something and then getting it back again, and the songs were melodic, dark, progressive and deep; a direction that My Chem had never really taken before with their songwriting.

“It felt good to be back together, to be playing again,” Gerard smiles. “We were all really excited about this record, and I was so glad to have Frankie back. The recording process went by smoothly, we all produced the record together and Ray mixed it, so it was really just a collaborative effort between all of us.”

On March 22nd, 2016, ‘My Chemical Romance: The Odyssey’ was released, and the first single ‘We March to Our Own Beat’ instantly hit the top of the charts both in the States and the United Kingdom. The band took their wives and children and loaded them all onto a bus, and toured through North America together for eight months.

“It was like a fucking travelling circus,” Gerard laughs. “We all really grew together, as a family, and the kids really became sisters and brothers. It was so great to see them play and laugh together, and on the rare occasions when we brought them out on stage you could just see their eyes glistening with amazement, and it was the best thing ever.”

As the tour went over seas after a short break in December, they left their families at home in the States and went on to tour Europe, Asia and Australia by themselves. Now their sense of brotherhood was completely returned, and according to Gerard it almost felt like they had never been apart at all.

“We were back where we had started and that felt amazing,” he says and takes a sip of his coffee. “There was no tension whatsoever, and I had sort of learned to control my feelings for Frankie. It just wasn’t difficult to be around him anymore, because everything just felt natural.”

It couldn’t be ignored that they had all grown old during these months apart, and when Gerard turned forty in April 2017 it became a milestone. They were no longer the new, young band, fighting their way through the music scene; they had become the experienced veterans, the still living legends. 

“I felt so fucking old,” Gerard groans, “and when I turned forty there was, like, no turning back. I just couldn’t call myself young anymore, I was grown up for real and that scared me. A part of me I think has always just wanted to be sixteen again, because when you’re young you can be angry and defiant and punk rock and it’s cool. When you’re old, you just look like a wannabe.”

In celebration of their new role in rock as no-longer-the-young-and-pretty-things My Chem shot a video for one of their old b-sides, ‘Kill All Your Friends’. The video featured the band working at McDonalds, with grease stained clothes looking old and tired and generally giving the impression that they all were failures. This sparked a riot amongst some of the fans, who took to great measures to assure the band that they were still young and pretty and not failures at all. 

“There was an uproar,” Gerard laughs, “and it got so far that we actually had to repel the video, because the reactions were from out of this world. It was creepy and strange and everywhere we went there were kids wearing Ronald McDonald suits in protest, and I have no idea where they all got the costumes from.”

The band’s world tour took a long time this time around, because of their constant trips back home and out on tour again, and as 2017 came to a close the band were exhausted. They decided to take a break again, but with everyone living in the same city getting together to play was a lot easier and a lot more fun than before. 

2018 was a mellow year for the band; they had jam sessions and videogame weekends, and Gerard spent his free time making art. He got involved again in his art gallery, and wrote a third installment to his old classic ‘The Umbrella Academy’, published in October.

“I think we really needed to take some time off,” he explains, “but we didn’t need to take time off from each other. We spent day and night together, all four of us, and we weren’t really planning for whatever was next, you know? We didn’t think about what the next record was going to be like, we didn’t pressure each other to come up with sheer greatness; we just played together because it was fun and because that was what we needed. It felt very organic, making music that way, because there was no pressure from us, no pressure from the record label, no pressure from the fans. It was just four kind of old guys playing together because it was all we wanted to do.”

  
**Chapter Seven: California 2019**  


Once 2019 came along, the band and their management group all started frantically preparing for a huge party that was planned to be held in Los Angeles that spring. Fans got to buy tickets for the event, where they would get to mingle with each other and the band, watch the band play the entire ‘Danger Days’ record live and dress up as their killjoy alter egos.

“I was so fucking excited about that party,” Gerard remembers with a smile, “and I dyed my hair back to red and everything for it. We were all going as our killjoy characters, and taking those costumes out of our closets and dusting them off just felt so liberating. I couldn’t believe that we had actually made it this far.”

On April 16th, the House of Blues opened up for anyone with a ticket, and the party hosted by the band was an immediate success. People came from all over the world, dressed up like futuristic outlaws, and Gerard recalls that night like it happened yesterday.

“When we played our set,” he starts, “there was magic in the air. Some of these songs we hadn’t played for several years, and somehow they felt new to us. It was an incredible feeling, looking out over that sea of people and knowing that they were all there because we meant something to them. The decorators had really nailed the feel of the ‘Danger Days’ universe; there was loud colors and neon and strobe lights everywhere, and just to see so many people there dressed up in their killjoy costumes was so amazing. I had always dreamed of 2019 to come along and to be as loud and defiant and difficult as we made it up to be, and that night, I felt like it was all real.”

He pauses to light a cigarette, and takes a drag thoughtfully before continuing. One would have thought as an eighty year old man, he would have stopped smoking by now, but no. He is still defiant and cocky, sticking his middle finger up to the world in everything he does.

“The best part,” he recalls with a smile, blowing out the smoke, “was when the Draculoids stormed in right in the middle of the set, where ‘Jet Star and the Kobra Kid/Traffic Report’ would have been played. They came in with laser guns and rifles, and there was such a sense of panic in the room. Everybody were wondering what the fuck were going on, and then from up on the stage, we all calmly took out our guns and shot them down, one by one. The bodies fell to the ground and as we launched into ‘Party Poison’, the crowd was distracted and I don’t think they noticed when the Draculoids stopped playing dead and sneaked out again.”

When their set was over, the party in the club with the fans continued on like before, with a showing of their videos for ‘Na Na Na’ and ‘SING’ being played against one of the walls in the background. The band hung out in a VIP section of the club, together with their friends and families, and the open bar was more than frequently visited by them all. Even Gerard, who hadn’t been drinking properly since he got clean and sober in 2004, loosened up and had a few glasses with the others.

“I shouldn’t have been drinking,” he says and makes a grimace, taking another drag of the cigarette, “but I just couldn’t help it. Everybody were drinking and having a good time and it was just too easy, taking a few shots together with the others.”

In the inevitable haze that comes from drinking a bit too much, and without a clue as to what had happened, Gerard after a few drinks found himself trapped in a secluded corner of the club, pressed up against the wall by one drunk Frank Iero. 

“Man,” he groans in remembrance, “that was so stupid. The alcohol made everything so much easier, and we just weren’t afraid to flirt with each other that night. And then suddenly, I had no idea of what was going on, I found myself pinned to the wall, and he was leaning in close to my face and whispering ‘I want you so much’, before our lips touched.”

He pauses and takes another drag.

“We didn’t even _think_ to look back over or shoulders to see if anyone was watching. We simply didn’t think,” he continues. “I was just too lost in the feeling of his body against mine, the feeling of getting to kiss him again, which was something I had deeply missed. We held onto each other tight and ground against each other feverishly, and as our lips clashed together it was as if nothing else mattered. And then, somehow, we realized that we couldn’t exactly keep doing that in public, so I dragged Frank with me into our dressing room that was wall to wall with the VIP room.”

He shakes his head sadly, finishing his almost fading cigarette. 

“And we couldn’t hold back,” he sighs, and flicks the cigarette bud into an ash tray on our table. “We couldn’t think straight, we just got caught up in the moment and though I think somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that what we were doing was wrong, I ignored it. Because I was finally getting what I had always wanted, and I just couldn’t bring myself to stop what we were doing. He told me that he loved me, and as I pushed into him slowly, we locked eyes and it was as if he could see through my soul. I swear, I couldn’t look away.”

He shrugs.

“It was the most amazing feeling. It felt like we were doing it in slow motion, like everything was happening in ultra rapid, and I never wanted it to end. He called my name when he got off the edge, and I had never heard a more beautiful sound in my entire life. And when it was over, when we stood together in each other’s arms, shivering, there was a sudden bang on the door and it sobered me up instantly. ‘Gerard,’ Frankie whispered as tears rose in my eyes, ‘I wish we could be together,’ and then he shook his head and pecked my lips, and before I could say anything he just pulled up his pants and walked out the door.”

Tears build up into his eyes and he takes a shaky breath, grabbing my hand for comfort.

“There stood Lindsey,” he continues quietly, “and she was the one who had knocked. Frankie just swept by past her without a word where she stood in the doorway, and I just about collapsed to the floor before she rushed over to catch me. And she held me, rocked me in her arms and let me cry against her shoulder, and I loved her because she understood.”

Though everyone out in the VIP area surely understood what had been going on, no one else came in to check on Gerard. Frank went straight to the bar again, to drink the memories away, and while everyone was confused the party went on as if nothing had happened. Gerard stayed in the dressing room with Lindsey, not wanting to go out to face his friends.

“I just didn’t know what to do,” he sighs. “She told me that he had made a mistake, that he was an asshole for walking out on me twice, that he didn’t know what he was missing… but I just felt heartbroken. This was the second time that had happened to me, and though I was drunk it still hurt. I guess maybe I just thought that things would change, that he would mean what he said, but I was wrong. The rest of the night is just a blur to me, I remember crying and hiding and wanting everything to just end, but I can’t remember if I got out of the dressing room, how I got home, if I looked Frankie in the eye again.”

Gerard woke up the next morning in his own bed to a pounding headache and a bad taste in his mouth, and with a desperate urge to call Frank. He didn’t, though.

“Lindsey assured me that nothing good would come out of it, and I actually think she was right,” he explains with a shrug. “By creating some space between us for a few days I was able to get over him by my own, not that I ever really got over him though but I was at least able to look past it, to let it go. And when we met up for dinner at Mikey and Alicia’s place a week later, it was as if nothing had ever happened. Frankie smiled at me when I came into the room, and when Bandit rushed to hug her younger sisters and brother he took my coat and hung it up. He was the perfect gentleman. He pulled out my chair at the table, sat down next to me and served me salad and wine and never once did he seem uncomfortable. Lindsey sat by my other side and she kept nudging me under the table through the entire meal, and later when we talked about it at home she said she was utterly convinced that Frankie had been trying to flirt with me the entire evening.”

He pauses and lights another cigarette.

“I don’t know if I believed her,” he admits, “because I thought Frankie just wanted to make it right. It would have been such a risky thing to do, flirt with me in front of his wife, my wife, our brothers and their wives, and our _kids_ , to top it off, and I didn’t really think that seemed like a thing he would do. But she refused to listen, and I think on some level she made me believe what she said.”

As the band got back into the practice studio later that week, trying to decide in what direction to go next, the tension grew between Gerard and Frank. However the tension wasn’t bad; it was a strange, sexual tension that Gerard didn’t quite know what to make of.

“He would give me these looks,” he recalls, “that just said ‘come hither’. He’d smirk at me, casually playing tiny parts of ‘Feeling Ready’ in between songs with a quirk of his eyebrow towards me, and it was as if he really wanted me to break down. And,” he laughs in remembrance, “as we grew more sure about what our next record was going to be, and as we got further into the recording process, I -”, he cuts himself off to take a drag.

“Well,” he continues with a smirk, “let’s just say I started to wear a lot of really tight clothes,” he grins at me around his cigarette. “Because two can totally play at this game, right?”

  
**Chapter Eight: Pride and Prejudice**  


With everybody in the band back on board again, My Chemical Romance started tracking songs for the first time in three years. While being back in the studio felt new for a band that had been out on tour for quite some time, they were all excited about their new material and wrote like never before. Gerard’s lyrics were notably happier and more hopeful than they had ever been, despite all that had happened.

“I think I was writing about Frankie again,” he admits with a tiny smile. “I was just so happy to get to spend time with him, we were having so much fun in the studio and we were always joking around and being stupid and flirty with each other and I just couldn’t contain myself. I needed an outlet for all that I was feeling and as usual, I launched into song because that was all I knew of doing. I just let it all flow out into songs, all the angst, the pining, the frustration and the pride in being in love.”

And though Gerard hadn’t intended it to be that way, ‘pride’ really became a theme for the entire record. And the first single, ‘Walk This World (With Pride)’, flat out became an anthem for the LGBT community all around the world, and especially for the gay kids in the band’s fanbase. With lyrics such as “Hold your head up high / Cast all their hate aside / Be stronger and together we will / Walk this world with pride” and “Just take my hand and make a stand / For what it’s worth you will be heard / ‘Cause you deserve / To walk this world with pride” the song was soon being played at gay clubs and Pride festivals all over the world.

"I was in love with a guy," Gerard explains, "and I had come to consider myself a part of the gay community, though I wasn't out of the closet. And there were always these kids at our shows everywhere, holding hands with someone of the same gender and I just wanted them to feel safe with us. 'Walk This World' really wrote itself, and it was for all the kids out there that needed some hope."

Though the song was immediately taken to heart by the band's fanbase, some people found it strange to see such an obvious anti-homophobia message come from a band that had always claimed themselves as heterosexuals. Gerard was deeply offended by these opinions, and wrote a speech that he presented online in a video on My Chemical Romance’s website in October, 2019.

“Our anti-homophobia stance has always been a huge part of My Chemical Romance,” he said in the speech, “and we are not ashamed of that. We will support our gay fans until the day we die, and we believe in equal rights for everyone.”

And after twenty minutes of pointing out exactly what made My Chemical Romance say no to homophobia, Gerard wrapped up the speech with a wink and a playful “… and I sure as hell have never considered myself heterosexual, so I don’t know where you guys got that from.”

You can imagine the chaos that followed. Gerard laughs when I mention it.

“Yeah,” he grins, “that started a bit of a commotion, I guess. People weren’t ready to hear that, I think, and since there were already rumors out there that I had written love songs about my guitarist people started to assume things. I felt really bad for Lindsey, because paparazzi were always pestering her with questions about whether or not I was having an affair, if she had ever felt threatened by my sexuality, you know, shit like that… And it was hard for her, because she obviously knew a lot more than what she was allowed to tell everyone, and since she’s a very honest person she struggled to keep quiet.”

The band was ultimately also affected, and they had to actually stop doing interviews for a while in late 2019 because the questions regarding Gerard’s (and the others’) sexuality became too hard to handle. The fans reacted well to the whole thing, on the other hand; they were mostly proud of Gerard for standing up for himself and for gay people everywhere, and as word spread ‘Walk This World’ soon topped not only the Billboard chart, but also a number of other charts all around the world. By the time My Chem was ready to release their record in early 2020, they were already booked to perform on the main stage at the Los Angeles Pride parade that spring.

“That was a fun show,” Gerard remembers. “Obviously it was controversial and especially since I had come out of the closet there was a lot of media and paparazzi there. I felt so fucking old, looking out over all these young kids that had all their lives ahead of them, but Frankie came over to whisper ‘So fucking proud of you, baby,’ in my ear during ‘[You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in] Prison’, and suddenly I felt young and pretty again. I turned my head and kissed him, because it needed to be done.”

Pictures of that kiss were soon on the front page on magazines all over the world, and Gerard and Frank once again found themselves having to defend their “entirely platonic” relationship to the world.

“After L.A. Pride we really had to make sure not to go near each other in public again,” Gerard snorts in amusement. “We didn’t want to fuel the rumors, because our kids had gotten old enough to start pay attention to the media and to what the world was saying. So to protect their innocent eyes and ears, we made a point to always sit at the far ends of the band in interviews, and we didn’t flirt around with each other on stage anymore.”

Was it difficult to stay away from him, I wonder?

“Who says I was staying away from him?” he smirks, and looks almost like his younger self again. “Backstage we were as flirty and loveydovey as ever. But no one else needed to know that, right? We kept our relationship – it wasn’t really a relationship, but whatever – secret, and the guys and the crew and our wives really were there for us, they didn’t rat us out. Bandit and her sisters and Miles were all thrilled –“

Hang on, I say in interruption. Why the constant mentions of the Iero twins as Bandit’s “sisters”?

“Well,” he admits thoughtfully, “I think in some way, we were always a family, all of us. The kids have always called both of us ‘dad’, for instance. Even before we got together, they called us ‘dad’. I think they knew about us before anyone else did, they were all so incredibly perceptive and bright even though they were so young. They were always onto us.”

On May 13th, 2020, ‘Carousels and Courage’ was launched into the world, and since ‘Walk This World’ had already taken the world by storm, the record sold platinum in the United States after just one week. The band set off on the Carousel Tour, again taking their wives and children with them, and this time it really _was_ like a travelling circus. They brought acrobats and clowns and pyrotechnics, all to make the shows as grand as possible, and the shows weren’t held in venues; they were held in a huge circus tent in stead, set up on fields and parking lots all over America.

“The Carousel Tour became legendary,” Gerard recalls. “People talked about that in the business for years to come. It was something completely new, something no one had ever done before, and we were having so much fun! It was weird sharing the stage with acrobats and shit, they danced all over the place and we kept having to dodge them and stuff, but at the same time we had grown kind of old and I just couldn’t shake my ass like I used to, it was not possible. So we needed someone else to shake their ass instead.” 

As they worked their way through North America, the relationship between Frank and Gerard thickened. Their wives watched them with amusement, having given them their blessing long ago, and Gerard for the first time in what seemed like forever actually felt happy.

"I suddenly had everything I had ever wanted," he smiles. "Of course we couldn't be together in public, and I was always jealous of Jamia for getting to be his real family, but I knew there was no way Frank and I were ever going to get married, we could never have what he had with Jamia, and I was mostly fine with that. After all, I still kept Lindsey around, and I really think I would have gotten insane without her. She kept my feet on the ground, and she was always really happy for me."

But how did Jamia take it, I wonder? 

"I don't think she was as thrilled as Lindsey was," he says thoughtfully. "She never said anything, never let us know that she felt alone, but I think in some way she missed being Frankie's one and only. Lindsey came into my life knowing exactly what she'd get, knowing exactly how I felt about someone else, but Jamia got together with Frankie thinking she was his world, thinking that couldn't change. I think she couldn't really look past the fact that she hadn't got exactly what she bargained for."

He pauses uncertainly, and I can see that he's not very sure of what to say.

"She couldn't have left him," he muses, "because she still loved him. I think somewhere along the line, their relationship had changed too; they weren't lovers anymore, they were just best friends, sort of like me and Lindsey. But the difference between us was that they had once had something, a spark, and I don't think Jamia could cope with knowing that that all was gone. She looked at me and saw the life she should have had, and I felt so deeply sorry for taking everything away from her."

Though when the tour went over seas to Europe in October, their families stayed at home and Gerard found it easier to be in love when there was no one around that he needed to feel sorry for. And on Frank's thirty ninth birthday, the two finally decided to define their relationship once and for all.

"I had a boyfriend," Gerard says in amazement, "and that was something I had never had before. I think that was the best birthday present he could have gotten; knowing that I would always be there for him. It felt like the natural step to take, because we had obviously been in love since forever ago and to finally put a label on what we had felt so huge."

That night, the band played an intimate show in a small venue in London, and Gerard brought a huge birthday cake out on the stage before the encore. Frank blew out the candles to the fans' cheers, and as the lights went out Gerard kissed him, safely hidden in darkness.

Or so they thought.

"Yeah," Gerard laughs, "the lights went on again just a _little_ too quickly. I had only intended to peck his lips briefly, but I just got lost in the moment and so did he, we just couldn't break apart. And then all of a sudden there was light and I swear, the entire venue was dead silent. No one even dared to breathe. We broke apart immediately, of course, but that didn't change the fact that everyone had seen us."

The band quickly grabbed their instruments and launched into 'The Kids From Yesterday' as a way of distraction, but that didn't take away from the excitement over Gerard and Frank at all. When the show was over, they had to be escorted back to their bus by police, because paparazzi had already gotten informed about what had happened, and some even tried to break into the bus once the band had all gotten inside and locked the door.

"Man, that was really scary," Gerard remembers with a shudder. "We really didn't know what to do, I felt bad because obviously I had messed up big time, but Frank and I curled up in our bunk together and watched Harry Potter, and it was as if nothing had happened. 'Baby,' he said, 'I don't care that they saw us,' and it was all okay, somehow. And the next day, when the internet was flooded with rumors, Bandit called me and told me that she missed her daddies, and that's when I realized that nothing could ever change the fact that Frank would always be a part of our family, as would I with his. No matter what our fans thought or what the media said, we would still be a family and it was supposed to be that way."

My Chem continued their tour the next day as if nothing had happened, going up on stage that night just as usual, and nothing was out of the ordinary. Ignoring the rumors and the 'FRERARD FOREVER' signs that could be spotted in the crowd, Gerard introduced Frank as 'The youngest of the young, the prettiest of them all, my best friend, the one and only man in my life - Frank Iero!', and obviously this did not help at all in terms of quieting down the rumors about them.

"I was just so sick of it," Gerard explains. "So sick of having to hide it, so sick of having to dodge questions and cameras all the time, and I just for one second wanted to be able to let all that shit go. I later denied it, of course, but it didn't matter. All that mattered was that for one tiny second, I was able to be open with who I was and who I loved, and for one second I actually felt free."

  
**Chapter Nine: Twenty Fucking Years**  


As the World Carousel Tour came to a close in late spring, 2021, My Chemical Romance were exhausted once again. They decided to take a break, and because Frank and Gerard couldn't stand being away from each other a rather interesting decision was made.

"We bought a mansion in the outskirts of Los Angeles," Gerard explains, "with three apartments. Jamia got one, Lindsey got one, and Frank and I got one. The doors were always open and the kids could run about in the house as they liked, and it was great. We never got any divorces, and we never revealed to the media that this was how we were living, but somehow it got out that we had bought a house together, and I think all in all our fans mostly thought that we were just really close as families."

The band lay low for a few months, and Gerard used his free time to write comics and children's books. He practically sprouted out several graphic novels and short kids' books that year, and the most successful of them all was 'The Tales of the Breakfast Monkey', based on a cartoon Gerard had designed for Cartoon Network back in 2001.

As 2022 came along, My Chemical Romance decided it maybe was time to get together and play again, and their studio (that had stood empty for a couple of years) came to use again. This time, the band wanted to make sure not to get themselves into any trouble again regarding Gerard and Frank, and therefore Gerard's lyrics didn't make the cut if they hadn't been approved of the entire band.

"That was weird," he smiles, "to not get to decide for myself what I could and couldn't write, but ultimately it needed to be done that way. I had been spewing out songs that were all in one way or another about Frank and me, and we just couldn't have it that way. It was bad enough that people knew that we were living together, and if I kept putting in all these loose metaphors about him as well those rumors would soon turn into fact."

By this time, their children had all grown old enough to want to join their fathers in making music, and on My Chemical Romance's eighth full-length 'Crash Course', released in August, 2022, all four of them were featured.

"They were so excited to be on the record," Gerard recalls with a smile, "and they had obviously been playing different instruments since the day they were born so it was really like the natural next step to take, to let them play with us."

Cherry can be heard playing guitar on 'Quick Experiment', and Bandit played piano on 'In Ruins' (on which Miles also played percussion), and Lily played, weirdly enough, the _saxophone_ on 'Camera (Click Click Click)'. They were all featured vocalists on several of the tracks on the record, and Gerard remembers that the recording sessions were quite difficult.

"There was complete and total chaos," he laughs. "You put four eleven year olds in a studio with all these expensive guitars and mics and amps and stuff, and things crash into the floor everywhere around them. They actually smashed one of Ray's vintage guitars, and he was not happy. The mics and amps and the other stuff we could replace, but that was a really old guitar that was worth, like, fifty thousand dollars. They were definitely like a tiny tornado in the studio, but at least we were never bored when they were there."

This time, the band left the kids and wives at home as they began touring, and the Car Crash Tour took them through almost the entire world. They were playing huge arenas, having world famous bands coming in to open for them, and it started to dawn on them that they were starting to get really old.

“We had been a band for more than twenty years,” Gerard says, a little baffled. “Twenty fucking years. That’s a long time. We didn’t make a big deal of the twenty year anniversary, we were kind of saving that for the twenty fifth anniversary, I think, so we hadn’t really realized how fast time had gone past. And somewhere along the line, we had become the legends that we were always admiring as children. We had become Iron Maiden and Bruce Springsteen and Morrissey to these new bands. It was always weird, meeting younger bands that had grown up listening to us, and sharing a stage with them when we got to was just amazing.”

As the band looked back over their career, they felt there were some things they weren’t quite done with. The ‘Danger Days’ universe, for example, was something that they all missed and they felt they needed to reconnect to those days again. And so they put in a studio in the back of their bus again, and recorded their ninth record ‘ELIMINATE’ over the course of three weeks while on tour. ‘ELIMINATE’, released in October, was the second ‘Mad Gear and Missile Kid’ record done by the band, and consisted of twelve 90 second songs once again about the fictive world of 2019.

“’ELIMINATE’ was a lot of fun,” Gerard remembers. “It was great to finally have an extension to ‘EXTERMINATE’, and as I listen to those two records nowadays I get really emotional, because it was ten years between making those records. And still when you listen to them they sound the same, like nothing has changed. It’s like we hadn’t grown older at all, like we were still young and angry and defiant and I just love that.”

With another record just released, the band had loads of material to tour on, and in late spring 2023 they made a decision to lengthen their tour just a couple of weeks before they were scheduled to come home. So they went from Japan straight to Europe again, with just a brief stop by at home in between. They booked shows with only a few weeks’ notice, and the fans were thrilled to see them come back again. 

“No one really knew what was going to happen after that tour, so we wanted to hold onto it for as long as possible,” Gerard explains. “We had been a band for twenty years and we were starting to get kind of tired, but we loved playing so much we just couldn’t stop doing it, because we didn’t know if we would ever get to do it again.”

Did you ever talk about quitting, I ask him, and he shakes his head thoughtfully.

“No, but there was just a vibe in the atmosphere that maybe people were beginning to get drained of all their energy. We were all so fucking old, I mean, even _Frankie_ was over forty and though he still acted like a kid at heart, and though he still looked twelve years old, there was no denying the fact that we just weren’t what we used to be. And who knew if people would still like us if we were old and ugly, who knew if our fans would turn their backs on us when we began to lose our hair? We didn’t know, and it was scary. So to hold on to our younger days, we needed to stay on tour for as long as we could, because it was a part of us that we just couldn’t bear parting from.”

As the band voiced their concerns in interviews, the extended Car Crash Tour began to turn into a farewell tour, of sorts. The fans all went to the shows to say goodbye, to thank the band for an amazing twenty years, and in return the band played each show like it was their last, trying to play at least one song from each album at every show. 

“It felt important at the time,” Gerard says, “to integrate every little part of our past into our shows. We had reached some sort of a milestone, we thought we had peaked, and we didn’t want to try and top what we had done in the past. We just wanted to pay homage to our songs and to our work, and I think we really nailed that with our shows at the time. Frankie was always working hard on creating the perfect setlist; ever since we started the band he was always the one who decided what we were going to play, and I think in those last few runs of the Car Crash Tour he really nailed it. He really did create the perfect setlist, once and for all, and it felt good to end with a bang.”

However they obviously couldn’t stay on tour forever, and in November when Frank broke his foot on stage they were forced to realize that maybe it was time to call it quits and go home.

“He couldn’t keep playing,” Gerard explains, “and we didn’t want to bring in a replacement. So we really just needed to stop, we were all tired and old and we just couldn’t keep going like we could when we were twenty five.”

Not knowing what was going to happen with the band, they went on an indefinite hiatus that rolled through the entire 2024. Frank and Gerard played housewives, staying at home with the children most of the time, and their three apartment mansion was beginning to turn into just a mansion, as the doors were open not only to the kids, but to everyone.

“We just said ‘fuck these apartments, let’s all live together’”, Gerard remembers. “We loved each other, all of us, and we were all best friends so there was really no reason to keep the doors locked. We slowly grew into a family, all eight of us, and since we were all on such great terms with each other there was absolutely no reason to get divorced, because we would rather keep up an appearance than start a lot of drama involving the children.”

Though My Chemical Romance was basically broken up, they all still got together in their studio to play at least once or twice a week. Though they made a decision to try not to write anything, so mostly they just played their own older songs.

“It was difficult, not to write,” Gerard recalls. “We have always been very creative people, and to just decide that we weren’t allowed to create anymore was one of the hardest things we had ever done.”

As Gerard started to devote a lot of time to his art again, Frank became the CEO for his old record label again, ‘Skeleton Crew’, in order to have something to do. Ray started to work at the label as a producer, and Mikey and his wife Alicia left for Japan to work with movies, not coming back for a whole year.

“I get that he wanted to do something new,” Gerard says, “but I missed him so fucking much. I was really angry at him for just leaving like that, but at the same time, what could I have done to stop him? It was what he wanted to do, and I couldn’t have made him stay if I had tried.”

With Mikey over seas and everybody else quite busy with other projects, it seemed like My Chemical Romance was going to be over once and for all. They didn’t want to play, not with Mikey not there, and though their twenty five year anniversary was coming up they thought that maybe they had had their time to shine.

“I didn’t want it to end,” Gerard sighs, “but it seemed like everyone had really moved on. When Mikey was gone it just wasn’t the same, we would get together at me and Frank’s house and we wouldn’t even _touch_ the guitars, because it just didn’t feel right without Mikey.”

  
**Chapter Ten: Surprise, Surprise**  


Time went past, and though Gerard missed his brother he learned to cope. After all, it’s not like he was alone in any way. They spoke every day on the video phone, and since Frank and Lindsey and Jamia and the kids were always around, Gerard didn’t feel lonely. He focused once again on his art gallery, and together with Frank and the wives he watched the kids grow up to young adults. And when Bandit turned sixteen in May that year, they threw a huge killjoy party in the backyard for all her friends, and Gerard sees that as the moment when he realized that Bandit was finally grown up.

“She looked beautiful,” he remembers with a smile. “She dyed her hair bright red just for that party, and dressed up as sort of a female Party Poison, and I was so unbelievably touched that she looked up to me like that. ‘Danger Days’ was always her favorite record, and a killjoy party was all that she wanted. I remember back in 2019 when we wouldn’t let her come to the party we had then, and she almost died a little inside. So a killjoy party was really the only thing we could do, and everyone who showed up dressed up like killjoys and it was just like back in the day, seeing how our fans would dress up to shows. It was great.”

Turning sixteen gave Bandit a new sense of courage, and Gerard remembers a particular conversation the two had in the kitchen that night.

“She said she had something important to tell me,” he recalls, “and she looked so scared I got worried instantly. She had been hiding in the kitchen for a while and I came to check on her, and she just sighed and asked if she was grown up enough to realize things on her own.”

He pauses and shrugs.

“I told her that she was,” he continues, “and she almost started to cry. ‘Daddy,’ she said with tears in her eyes, ‘I like girls.’”

He shakes his head as if in disbelief, with a proud smile on his lips.

“I had really no idea, but I was so fucking proud of her,” he smiles, “and I made sure to let her know that. She crashed into my arms and I told her it was okay, and I couldn’t believe that she was so brave. Frank and Lindsey came in and wondered what was up, and she just looked them straight in the eye with a smile on her face, and told them without blinking. We were so fucking proud of her.”

With this new revelation over and done with, Bandit could proceed to party the rest of the night like she was the queen of the world. Gerard remembers watching her kiss another girl timidly under a tree in their garden at the end of the night, and that was the most happy for her he had ever been, he says.

“She just looked so happy,” he sighs, “and I never wanted that smile of hers to fade. That really was the best party in the history of all parties, for so many reasons.”

In the spirit of surprises, about a month later there was a knock on the door to the Way-Iero mansion, and fourteen year old Lily rushed to open it. There stood none other than Michael Way, who hadn’t set foot in that house in over eight months.

“I couldn’t believe that he was back,” Gerard smiles. “It was all so unreal, Lily just shrieked at the door and I was so scared, I thought it was a burglar or something, but then I rush down the stairs to save her and who is standing there but _Mikey_. He smiled, hugging Lily tightly, and when I reached them I could see that he was tanned, blonde and looked a lot younger than forty five. Japan had treated him well. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before that I was coming,’ he grinned, ‘but I’m here to stay now.’”

And with Mikey back on track, their creative juices started flowing again and as they picked up their instruments and played together, they began to realize that maybe My Chemical Romance wasn’t as much dead and gone as they had thought. They began to schedule work sessions in their studio again, for the first time in years, and as time flew past they actually found themselves writing material that was good enough to record.

“It was so great to finally be playing again,” Gerard says. “We were all really excited to be back in the studio, we had really missed playing and since our anniversary was coming up if felt wrong not to take the opportunity that was given to us.”

As word got out that My Chem was back in the studio, fans were thrilled to hear that the band they had missed was back again, and anticipation was high as people were eager to get to know what the band had been working on.

And on December 4th, 2025, ‘(We’ll Never) Give up the Fight’ was released, and the band immediately went on tour through North America. The record sold platinum after just the first couple of days in the United Kingdom, and the band were baffled that even though they had been gone for quite some time, their fans still hadn’t forgotten about them.

“We would meet all these people at the shows, like, older people,” he remembers. “They had been fans since they were kids, and now after following us for twenty five years they had started to bring their kids to the shows and show a new generation what music was about, and that was so awesome, meeting all these adult fans that were telling us ‘hey, I saw you guys back in 2006,’ and it really made us realize that we had come a long way.”

Back at home, Bandit, Cherry and Lily had started a band of their own; For Those Who Have A Heart, with Cherry on guitar and vocals, Bandit on bass and Lily on drums. (Miles wasn’t as into the music scene as the girls, and followed in Gerard’s footsteps instead; he drew a lot and turned down the girls’ offer for him to be in the band.) The girls played mostly shows in their basement for their proud mothers, but as they actually got booked to play at their high school for the first time they called Gerard and Frank up with excitement to tell them all about it.

“They were so fucking nervous, they had written four songs and were only allowed to play one of them, because the other ones had the f-word in them,” Gerard laughs. “Like father, like daughter, right? But when they played the show they were having the most fun they had ever had, and Bandit called me later and told me that this was what she wanted to do. I could only tell her to go for it.”

  
**Chapter Eleven: Calling It Quits**  


My Chemical Romance toured through the entire spring of 2026, not only in North America but also over in Europe and Asia. As the summer started, the band began to plan their anniversary more and more, and they came up with some great ideas. Not all of them could be accomplished, of course, but one of their plans was to release a documentary/live DVD/greatest hits cd, and on September 11th ’25 Years of Chemical Romance’ was released. It was a four disc compilation, of one documentary DVD that covered their entire career, one live DVD with performances from all different eras, one cd with twenty of their greatest hits (‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise)’,’ Welcome To The Black Parade’, ‘Vampires Will Never Hurt You’, ‘Na Na Na (Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na Na)’, ‘Planetary (GO!)’, ‘Face The Music’, ‘We March To Our Own Beat’, ‘Camera (Click Click Click)’ and ‘Letter To A Different Kind Of Us’ to name a few), and lastly one cd with new and previously unreleased songs from different recording sessions the band had had over the years, with songs such as ‘The Light Behind Your Eyes’, ‘Stay’, ‘The World Is Ugly’, ‘The Ballad of Blonde-Haired Gerard’, ‘The Escape Artist’ and ‘The Dead Pegasus Song’.

’25 Years of Chemical Romance’ became an immediate success, and sold out in record shops all over the world. It was the perfect celebration of the band’s career, and Gerard admits to actually watching the documentary sometimes at home when he’s bored.

“It’s just such a good summary of our lives,” he explains. “I know I might be a douche for saying so, but I actually enjoy watching it. It describes our entire career perfectly, and I couldn’t be happier about it. Sometimes when I need to remember something, I go and watch it just because it’s the best place to find memories.”

Their tour continued through the world as 2026 came to a close and 2027 took off, and as Gerard turned fifty in Australia in April, it became impossible to ignore the fact that they were all getting really old.

“I felt like I was dying,” Gerard laughs, “because I felt old when I turned _forty_. And now ten years later, I’m still doing the same thing and still meeting the same people every day and still going around the world, seeing all these places that I’ve already seen a million times before. I just couldn’t concentrate on anything but the fact that it was all getting really old, I mean not just myself and the band, but what we were doing as well. It felt just like it did back in 2008, when we were just so sick of touring and so sick of playing the same songs over and over again every night, so sick of the bus, so sick of not getting to be with our families, so sick of everything. I told Frank how I felt one night before we went to sleep, and he nodded and pulled me close. ‘I feel it too,’ he said sadly. ‘The end is beginning.’”

And that was what was really going on. There was no denying it anymore.

“We had a meeting the next day,” Gerard says a little grimly, “and then it was decided. We couldn’t keep doing this anymore, because it just wasn’t fun. We had released ten albums, and that felt like it was enough. We all shared the same feeling, that being on stage and playing these songs just wasn’t what it used to be. We had grown out of it.”

They changed the name of the tour the next day, to the My Chemical Romance Farewell Tour, and fans were surprised, to say the least. Tickets sold out fast to the remaining shows, and now that the band knew that there was an end to what they were doing, they regained some spark and did all they could to make the shows as grand and spectacular as possible.

“I’m not saying we regretted it,” Gerard explains, “but as soon as there was a definite ending to this band it suddenly got so much more important that we did it the right way. Playing became less of a struggle and more of a fight to do the right thing. We all put so much into our performance again, there was such an energy there that we hadn’t really felt before.”

And after four months of intense touring, My Chemical Romance’s last show ever was played at Wembley Stadium in London, and an impressive 87,000 tickets were sold to the four hour event on September 11th, 2027. With opening acts such as LostAlone, old friends of the band, and new and upcoming Classic Artifacts, the show was bound to be legendary. MCR took the stage at nine pm, after LostAlone had finished their set, and from the moment they stepped onto the stage there was magic in the air. Gerard remembers the show with tears glistening in his eyes.

“It was the greatest moment of my life,” he says with amazement, “and I never wanted it to end. We played for three hours straight, under the sickest of light shows you could ever imagine, and we played all our favorite songs and it was just amazing.”

With an epic setlist of thirty two songs plus encores, the band whipped out old rarities that they hadn’t played live in ages, such as ‘Honey, This Mirror Isn’t Big Enough For the Two of Us’, ‘Desert Song’, ‘Zero Percent’ and ‘It’s Not A Fashion Statement, It’s A Fucking Deathwish’. Fans were thrilled to get to hear their old favorites, and the show became known as one of the greatest rock shows ever played.

“I felt like it was 2007 all over again and we were having the time of our lives playing Projekt Revolution,” Gerard remembers fondly. “And because I felt that sort of sexual energy in the air, I knew that when we played ‘Prison’, something was just bound to happen. We weren’t young and pretty anymore, but I thought ‘to hell with it’. I was going to get those thirty five year old fangirls crazy again, we were going to make them scream. So during Ray’s solo, I just went for it. ‘One last time, baby,’ I screamed into the mic, and as fireworks went off all around us I just kissed Frankie.”

He pauses and lights yet another cigarette, and I’m beginning to honestly wonder why he isn’t coughing like crazy with all the smoke he’s inhaling at his age.

“There was no other way to end it,” he continues and blows out the smoke in a soft puff of air. “There needed to be a stagekiss, just one last stagekiss because it was what defined us. Me and Frankie. And I just loved him that night, loved to share the stage with him and hated that it was the last time I would ever get to do that, and I was really sad and I needed him. I needed the comfort of what felt like home, and he was home to me.”

After a total of seven encores, the band reluctantly left the stage in a group hug. All around the arena people stood up in their seats, crying and already missing them, and they didn’t stop cheering for almost fifteen minutes after the band had gone off the stage. Though after a toast in the dressing room, My Chemical Romance took the stage again, all in tears because it was finally over.

“We want to thank every last one of you,” Gerard said, “because you have made our lives complete. And finally, I want you to know that this isn’t a goodbye. It’s _never_ a goodbye, because this band, is for _life_. There will always be a My Chemical Romance, in my heart and in yours. So even if we never play a song again, even if we never play a show, there will still be a My Chemical Romance because there is no fucking way that we could give up on this. We love you and we love our band too much to give up. This isn’t the end, my darlings; this is the beginning of something new for My Chemical Romance. _You_ are My Chemical Romance, _we_ are My Chemical Romance, and we will _always_ be My Chemical Romance!”

And with those final words, with the screams and shouts from the crowd ringing in their ears, the band bid farewell to the last twenty six years of their lives.

  
**Chapter Twelve: The Aftermath**  


With My Chemical Romance out of the way, Gerard could focus more on his family and art. The art gallery he bought all those years ago received much of his attention over the next couple of years, and he had the time to write and release several graphic novels as well. Still living in the Way-Iero mansion with Lindsey, Frank, Jamia and the kids, life in their household was simple and quiet for a while. The girls and Miles grew up to young women (and man), bringing home boyfriends and girlfriends to meet their parents, and though Gerard was happy for them, he still found it difficult to accept that they weren’t children anymore.

“They were so grown up and I hadn’t really thought about that before, what that would be like,” he says with a shake of his head. “Now that we weren’t touring anymore, I was constantly at home and I met them every day, and that felt so new. I wasn’t used to getting to see them every day, I wasn’t used to them being a part of my every day life and it was surprising, really, how much they changed from day to day. They were always really interesting to observe, and I felt like I was so blessed to finally get to know them for real.”

Frank continued to work with his record label, and though they both found it weird to suddenly have normal nine to five jobs, they adjusted fairly quickly to their new lifestyle. And for a few years, life went by like nothing had ever happened, like My Chemical Romance had never existed, in a way. They found themselves still getting together to play and have fun, but without the constant stress of being expected to perform, playing together was much easier than it had been.

“We still called ourselves My Chemical Romance,” Gerard explains, “and we still played the same old songs and sounded like we used to. The only difference was that we were playing for _us_ , because we wanted to, not because we had an obligation to our fans and the world. My Chemical Romance still existed, it was alive and kicking, but it wasn’t necessarily up in everyone’s faces.”

And that was what life looked like for Gerard and the others, for years to come. Nothing changed much, and when Bandit and the twins moved out in 2030 to live by their own in an apartment in central Los Angeles, that was the first thing that had changed for a long time.

“I missed them a lot,” Gerard remembers, “but they had grown old enough to make their own decisions, and there was really nothing we could do about it. Their apartment was great, it was large and open and bright and it suited them well. They were still playing in their band, and Miles had gotten a job at a tattoo shop as an apprentice so he moved out too not long after the girls had, and we just needed to accept that they were moving on with their lives and growing up.”

Though the children weren’t living at home anymore, Frank and Gerard made a decision together with their wives to continue to live like they had used to, all together in the big house they shared. It was an unusual solution, but it worked for them.

“We were still on such good terms with each other, all of us,” Gerard explains, “so there was really no reason to change the way we lived just because the kids moved out. Jamia and Lindsey were still our best friends, and nothing was going to change that.”

And as the years went past, the children got older and their band got more successful. Gerard remembers seeing a lot of himself in his daughters, and as they toured the world much like their fathers had done, Gerard couldn’t help but feel like history was repeating itself.

For Those Who Have A Heart soon became known as the most influential all-girl-band in history, and though the girls were young they still made an impact. They gave a lot of younger girls the courage to be themselves, and they changed the usually so male dominated rock’n’roll world. And with Bandit being a completely out of the closet lesbian, the band was very inspirational for girls out there who maybe didn’t have the guts to come out quite yet.

In June, 2037, Bandit got married to her girlfriend, and moved in with her into an apartment not too far from the one she had lived in with the twins. Gerard remembers the wedding as one of the best days of his life.

“They were so beautiful,” he sighs in remembrance. “They were both wearing these long, white wedding dresses, and everywhere there were lilies and white roses, and the sun was shining and everything was just perfect. As I walked Bee down the aisle I just couldn’t hold back the tears. And as the minister pronounced them wife and wife, that was the single most beautiful moment in my life. Just the look on Bandit’s face when they kissed, a look of serene bliss, it just killed me. I grabbed Frankie’s hand and squeezed it, because I needed his comfort. Because that was something he and I would never get; we would never get to walk down the aisle together, we would never be pronounced husband and husband and in that moment, I was jealous. I wanted that.”

Thinking that things needed to change, once and for all, Gerard went home that day with Frank tying to gather up the courage to say something. Though his proposition didn’t quite receive the reaction he had hoped for.

“As we climbed into bed that night,” he recalls with sudden tears in his eyes, “I told Frankie that I thought it was our time to change our situation. I told him that I wanted him all to myself, and that I thought that we should finally, after all these years, get the divorces we had yearned for since forever ago.”

He pauses, looking down into his empty coffee cup as if trying to find the right words in it. When he looks back up to meet my eye, a lonely tear slides down the side of his face.

“He didn’t want to,” he continues in a tiny voice, and the sorrow resting behind his words is nearly breaking my heart. “He told me I was selfish, that I couldn’t just expect him to throw everything away just for me, and that he didn’t want to have to deal with the media. And when I told him that they likely wouldn’t care, because we just weren’t famous anymore, there was this look upon his face that scared me beyond understanding. He just looked vicious. ‘Gerard,’ he told me sternly, ‘I can’t be only yours, not if you are going to claim me like I am your property.’”

New tears join the formerly only one, and he swallows down a lump in his throat.

“And then he just left,” he whispers, and I reach across the table to grab his hand in comfort. “He didn’t say a word, he just left to sleep in Jamia’s room instead and the next morning, they were both gone.”

He pauses to let out a shaky breath, and tries to smile.

“And I didn’t know what I had done wrong,” he sighs. “He refused to take my calls, he just ignored me and all my attempts to get close to him again, and I could not fucking understand what I had done wrong just by proposing to him. We had been together for seventeen years. Seventeen years, and it meant nothing to him.”

Gerard turned to Lindsey for comfort, and neither of them could believe what had just happened.

“She told me that he would come back,” he says and shakes his head, “but we both knew that he wouldn’t. I had fucked it up, driven him away, and I so deeply regretted trying to change things, because I knew that we had been fine just the way we were. I guess the thought of getting divorced and announcing our relationship to the world for real was just too scary for him, and I shouldn’t have pushed him. Lindsey and I kept the house, thinking that there maybe was a chance that they would come back, but it was to no avail. We didn’t hear from them for over six months, _no one_ did. They didn’t talk to Mikey or Ray, and the kids wouldn’t tell us anything. I think they knew what was wrong, but if Frankie ever contacted them I sure as hell didn’t find out about it.”

Struggling with being alone, Gerard tried hard to be happy for his daughter and support her, while feeling lost because Frank wasn’t there. Gerard locked himself up in his art studio for months, not talking to anyone and making dark, gloomy art. Lindsey found it difficult to reach him, but Gerard didn’t care. All he could think of was how Frank had left him, and nothing else mattered to him. Several months went past and Gerard hid alone in his studio, not wanting to deal with the outside world. But as 2037 drew to a close, Gerard suddenly had other emergencies to deal with, and for better or for worse, his break up with Frank was pushed out of his mind.

“Lindsey,” he sighs sadly, “had some sort of a liver failure in December, and she was rushed into the hospital on Christmas Day. Bandit and I had no idea of what was going on, and we stayed in the waiting room for ages just waiting for updates, and then after what seemed like a lifetime a doctor comes out and tells us she’s in a coma and needs a liver transplant.”

He pauses, shaking his head in disbelief.

“And I didn’t know what to say. She was my best fucking friend, I loved her. She was the mother of my child. They wanted me to give half my liver up for her, and of course I said yes! I couldn’t have lived with myself otherwise. But,” he trails off and tears shine in his eyes, “when they did the tests it turned out I wasn’t a match. So they turned to Bee instead.”

And after many, long, painful medical tests performed on her, to everyone’s surprise it turned out that she wasn’t a match either. With no one else to turn to, Lindsey was put on the waiting list for a liver transplant, and no one knew how long that was going to take. Gerard and Bandit turned to their family and friends for support, and Gerard remembers only missing one person in the chaos that followed.

“Mikey and Ray and Christa and Alicia were all there, and both the twins and Miles and Bandit’s wife, and all I could think was that Frankie wasn’t there. He and Jamia had lived with me and Lindsey for about fifteen years, and still they didn’t think her life was important enough to care for. But maybe they didn’t know about it, I don’t know. But it felt wrong that they weren’t there, and I could really have needed Frankie’s support. Because without him and Lindsey, I’m really nothing.”

  
**Chapter Thirteen: Life and Loss**  


Finding a matching liver for Lindsey proved difficult, and after three weeks of laying in a coma she died. Gerard doesn’t want to talk about it, but when I mention the funeral a hint of a smile grazes his features.

“It was beautiful,” he remembers. “She was far too young, and it was awful, but as I sang ‘The Ghost of You’ at the funeral somehow it didn’t feel hopeless. I missed her, she was my other half, but at least I knew she hadn’t been in pain. The coffin wasn’t open, because there was no way I could have dealt with that, but I just knew that inside of it, she was looking as beautiful as ever. I placed a bouquet of black roses on the coffin and just as I looked up, Frankie and Jamia came through the door and sat down in the back of the church. I met his eye and he merely nodded at me, and right in that moment was when I started to cry. I had tried hard not to cry the entire day, but upon seeing him, I just lost it.”

When the ceremony was over and people started to flood out of the church, Gerard lingered behind by the coffin, trying to gather up the confidence to speak to Frank. But he didn’t need to, because once the church hall was empty, Frank approached him with an apologetic smile.

“He took my hand,” Gerard remembers with a tiny smile, “and he told me he was sorry. ‘I shouldn’t have left,’ he said, ‘but I felt like I had no choice. I know that without her you feel invisible, and I just couldn’t put you through that. So I’m here now, and you don’t have to be invisible anymore.’ And then he placed a bright red rose on the coffin, and with tears shining in his eyes he kissed me for the first time in forever.”

Jamia and Frank moved back into the mansion with Gerard the next day, and though they had made peace with each other Gerard never got to know why they had left and where they had gone.

“They just wouldn’t tell me,” he says, a little puzzled. “But I didn’t think too much about it, I was just trying to cope with Lindsey being gone, and that was really hard. I just couldn’t believe that I would never see her face again, never hear her voice. Though Frankie was with me again, constantly comforting me and being the most loving boyfriend ever, it didn’t change the fact that I had lost a part of myself. I was glad to have him back, but it felt wrong that in order to get him back into my life, Lindsey had to die. I just couldn’t believe it.”

Bandit found it hard to cope as well, and moved into the mansion with her wife for a few weeks because she needed to be with family.

“She had always looked up to Lindsey so much,” Gerard sighs. “She was playing the bass, and she looked so much like Lindsey and it was just like she had lost her source of inspiration. It was hard on her, it really was. She was too young to lose her mother, but at least she had us and her wife who could help her.”

Though Gerard had his boyfriend back in his life, he found himself deep in depression a few months after Lindsey’s death, and had to take to therapy and medication to get better.

“I was really skeptic about the meds,” he remembers. “I had taken anti-depressants before when I was younger and I just didn’t believe in them, I just thought they erased everything that made you who you are, and obviously I was afraid I was going to get addicted again. But Frankie convinced me to take them, because he didn’t want me to get worse, and so I did.”

It took a long time to get out of the depression, but with intense therapy programs, the right medication and loving support from Frank and the rest of his family, Gerard slowly got better and better. As time flew past, it got easier to deal with the loss of Lindsey for all of them, and when a year had gone past Gerard found himself actually having come to peace with the fact that she was gone. And later that spring, he got another surprise, and for the first time since Lindsey had died he actually felt like things were going to be okay.

“Bandit told me that she was pregnant,” he recalls with a smile, “and I just couldn’t believe it. I was really sad that Lindsey would never get to meet her grandchild, but at the same time it felt like she was sort of coming back to life, in this new person that was going to come soon.”

The child was conceived with the help of new, experimental technology, in which sperm had been created using the DNA from Bandit’s wife’s egg cells, to create a baby that was completely made out of the both girls’ genes, without the need of a father. And eight months and three weeks after Bandit had gotten the injection of female sperm, Emilie Ann Way was born, almost exactly two years after Lindsey’s death. The child was named partly after her grandmother, and Gerard remembers January 13th, 2040 being the first time he had smiled for real in a long time.

“She was so gorgeous,” he says in awe, “and I just couldn’t believe that I was a grandfather. She had Lindsey’s eyes,” he sighs.

This was going to be a new start for Gerard and his family, and later that week the entirety of MCR got together again for the first time in ages to play again. They weren’t used to their instruments, and there was no denying that they had gotten old. Ray was the only one who still played every day, and the others fell a little short of his enthusiasm.

“We just stopped playing and let him do his thing,” Gerard laughs, “because we really just wanted to hang out. And it was great, finally hanging out all four of us again, and we had so much to talk about and I just felt like I was finally home. With Lindsey gone, they were really all I needed.”

As Emilie got older, the similarity to her late grandmother became more and more prominent, and by the time she was two years old, she was already singing and drawing. Her black hair was often put up in pony tails, and Gerard couldn’t look away from the fact that she was so much alike Lindsey.

“I saw so much of Lindsey in her,” he recalls, “and it really made it easier to get over the fact that she was gone.” 

Later more surprises shook their family, and For Those Who Have A Heart took a brief break in 2042, because Cherry was pregnant as well, to everyone’s delight.

“When Cherry told us she was going to have a baby, I think that’s when it really dawned on Frankie that we were old,” Gerard laughs. “Emilie was his first grandchild, of course, but when Cherry was going to have a baby I think he realized he was going to be a grandfather for _real_. Like, there was no turning back.”

And on December 21st, Santana Blue Iero was brought into the world. Again, the family saw it like yet another birth marked the anniversary of Lindsey’s death, and Gerard is thankful for both the little girls.

“Santana was so much fun when she was a baby,” he remembers. “She was always laughing and smiling, and I remember that Emilie took a liking to her new cousin immediately. She was always acting like the proud older sister, and obviously their families were very close so they became almost like sisters, in a way. I knew they were going to grow up to be strong, independent women, and I was so glad that even though Lindsey had left us, there were other girls coming in to fill the void in my heart, and I knew they were going to be as amazing and wonderful as she was.”

Adapting to their new roles as grandfathers, Gerard and Frank had to evaluate their lives and how they lived. The children needed role models, and for the first time Gerard actually felt like he was somebody they could look up to. They spent a lot of time taking care of the children while their mothers were out on tour, and could easily recognize how they had brought up their children away from home, just like their daughters were doing now. 

“They were being the most amazing mothers,” Gerard smiles, “even though they were away. And I was just so proud of them for doing what we had done with them, once upon a time, and the fact that history really repeated itself baffled me. When our daughters became rock stars we didn’t really think about what that meant, but when they had kids, that’s when I realized that they were so much more like us than I had thought.”

  
**Chapter Fourteen: Legends**  


In 2045, My Chemical Romance was accepted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as one of the most influential rock bands in history. The entire band got together for a ceremony, celebrating their career, and it was the first time in many years that they formally attended a gala as My Chemical Romance. Gerard remembers the evening with a smile.

“We’ve never liked those kinds of things, galas or events really. It’s not our thing. But to get into the Hall of Fame, that was big and epic and something I never would have dreamed of. So that night we really let ourselves enjoy life, we got up and held a speech, we listened to younger performers cover our songs, we sat there and felt like the legends they told us we were, and it was amazing. I had always wanted to make an impact on the world, on music, and that night, I felt like we had achieved that. I felt like we had made a difference.”

My Chemical Romance were raised to the sky for all that they had done for the American rock music scene, and the event was grand and spectacular. Amongst the other bands attending the gala as performers, For Those Who Have A Heart performed a slow, soft version of 2010 hit ‘The Only Hope for Me Is You’, and Gerard remembers watching the girls proudly.

“Their cover was the best one,” he says, “hands down. The other bands were good too of course, but nothing could top their version of ‘Only Hope’. I felt like they sang it for us, for their mothers and for their daughters, and that song has always been about making it and finding your way through the chaos, and when they played it, I really felt like all my dreams had come true. All the words that I had written so many years ago suddenly made sense, and ever since then, I’ve felt like ‘Only Hope’ really is the truest song My Chemical Romance has ever written. It’s about the band and about our family, and it’s about everything that I have ever loved.”

By being accepted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, My Chemical Romance were promised to forever shine as a star on the vast music night sky, and that was something Gerard was going to be ever grateful for. Over the next couple of years, My Chem’s popularity in the youth culture grew even more, and their records sold platinum several times again.

Working in silence with their own projects, MCR didn’t acknowledge the commotion around them, until in late 2047, when Gerard got an interesting phone call from Warner Brothers. 

“They wanted to make a movie out of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’,” he explains, “and they wanted me to be involved with it a lot, like, help out with casting and give advice to the writers and work as assistant director, stuff like that. And because I’m a junkie for those kinds of projects, I just couldn’t say no. My only demand was that they used ‘[Three Cheers for Sweet] Revenge’ as part of the soundtrack, and they agreed.”

Many months of exhausting work followed, and though Gerard never wanted to give up he could still feel that he wasn’t as young as he used to be. He simply didn’t have the energy to keep going like he could back in the day, and to his dismay he couldn’t be as involved with the movie as he would have wanted to.

“I didn’t really get the chance to work my ass off like I wanted to, because I was seventy fucking years old and I just had to accept the fact that I couldn’t keep being a workaholic, because it would kill me. Frankie would always tell me to slow down, and I think somehow I had really realized that that’s what I needed to do.”

Though staying away from work proved hard, and Gerard still got involved with as many aspects of it as possible. 

“My favorite part was the casting process,” he remembers. “When we were going to cast actors for the Demolition Lovers, I wanted them to be particularly thorough and they were. I got to choose, for the most part, and I picked out this gorgeous, kind of androgynous girl for the Wife, and she looked kind of like Frankie when he was young. And to find a Gerard Way lookalike wasn’t difficult; there were tons of them. In the end, I think we really managed to find the right people for the roles, and it didn’t feel awkward at all to see my love story get played out by somebody else.”

And in November, 2049, ‘Demolition Lovers: Love Will Tear Us Apart’ was premiered, and the entirety of My Chemical Romance attended the premiere together. 

“Walking the red carpet again felt weird,” Gerard laughs, “because we had never felt at home on the red carpet and it was one of those things that we definitely didn’t miss. But there we were, doing it all over again, in front of paparazzi and fans and all these people, and we were dressed up nice in suits and everything and I didn’t like it at all. I wanted to hold Frankie’s hand, to have something of comfort with me, but obviously I couldn’t. I took a firm grip of my walking cane and that was that; that was the only thing I could hold onto.”

The movie was an instant success, and in the first week of showing over ten million tickets were sold, only in the States. It was nominated for seven Oscars, and was awarded with two; ‘Best Script’ and ‘Best Soundtrack’. The golden figurine for the soundtrack rests soundly on the top shelf in a glass cabinet Gerard keeps in his living room, and by its sides are several ‘Kerrang!’ awards, ‘NME’ awards, ‘Grammy’ awards and ‘MTV’ awards, amongst others.

“That was so awesome, and I couldn’t believe it,” Gerard remembers. “Obviously we had won awards for our music before, but this was the only one that mattered. It felt like my entire life had lead up to that point, when I walked onto the stage to hold my speech, I was shivering. I never thought I would get to hold an Oscar, and to get one to call my own was just a dream come true. It felt like ‘[Three Cheers for Sweet] Revenge’ had really served its purpose then; it had made a difference and it had become something huge.”

The story was later adopted into the musical theatre, and in 2051 ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ premiered on Broadway. It was the first time My Chemical Romance’s music had ever been rewritten into show tunes, and though Gerard approved of the idea he didn’t let himself get involved with the project.

“I let them do whatever they wanted to do,” he explains, “because obviously I have no experience with musical theatre whatsoever. I knew it was going to be amazing, and musicals is something I have always wanted to do, so I was kind of bummed that I was too old to be in it,” he laughs.

A new rendition of ‘The Ghost of You’ became the biggest hit from the show, and to this day it is still a classic within the musical theatre scene.

“It’s weird to me that our music can be altered and tempered with to fit other cultures,” he muses, “because that was never what I intended the song to be, but still it’s an extraordinary thing to know that even though I’ve never set my foot in the musical theatre industry, still there are ways to make a lasting impression and to change things. I was really baffled as to how that happened. It was sort of like when ‘Glee’ [TV show in the early 21st century, themed around musical theatre] covered ‘SING’ back in 2011, and turned our music into something so much more than it had ever been before. It felt like a blessing, seeing our songs be interpreted in such a different way.”

  
**Chapter Fifteen: I’ll Leave You, a Phantom**  


In late 2051, the Way-Iero family was hit with an unpleasant surprise. Frank had gotten ill, in severe cancer, and what followed was an intense year of chemo therapy and surgeries.

“We weren’t prepared for that,” Gerard sighs. “We were finally happy, and then suddenly this huge bomb was dropped on us and for a while there, we couldn’t cope.”

Frank spent most of the spring in 2052 on different hospitals, going through many painful surgeries and chemo therapy. But no matter what the doctors did, the cancer didn’t get better, and Gerard admits to losing hope after some time.

“It was so difficult, not to have him at home where he was safe,” he remembers sadly. “I just wanted to see him, be with him every second of the day, but he was always at some hospital and I couldn’t be with him except for during the visiting hours. He was weak and lonely, and I tried to be there for him as much as I could, but it was hard. I think the doctors all kind of figured he wasn’t worth saving, because he was so old and sick and he had already lived his life, so they focused on younger, more desperate patients instead and kind of let Frankie be sick because they thought there was nothing they could do anyway.”

He pauses and wipes away a tear from the corner of his eye angrily.

“But that was just bullshit. They could have saved him, they could have done their best. Who were they to decide whether he was allowed to live or not? I mean sure, he wasn’t young, but they gave him a death sentence. They put him on chemo and refused to do anything else, even though there had been a great progression in medicine regarding how to treat cancer, but they refused to try any of their newer methods on him.”

Though Gerard tried the best he could to get Frank’s doctors to do just a little bit more, no one listened to his pleas. Frank got worse and worse, and though he was hanging on Gerard remembers when the end started coming near.

“He was so tired towards the end, and it was as if he knew what was coming. He kept telling me and Jamia and the kids how much he loved us, stuff like that and I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t want to accept the fact that he was going to die. Because I never wanted to live one second without him, I couldn’t breathe without him near me. And when the doctors too started to make hints that there was nothing more they could do, I didn’t listen. I didn’t want to hear it.”

The summer went by, and there were no signs of Frank getting any better. And sadly, on July 23rd, 2052, Frank passed away, seventy years old.

“That was the worst day of my life,” Gerard recalls with more tears threatening to fall down his cheeks. “It was what our fans have always called ‘the International My Chemical Romance Day’, the fiftieth anniversary of the release of our first album; it was supposed to be a day about celebration and instead Frank Iero died on that fucking day. It was as if all the planets in the universe aligned to make that day as spiteful and ironic as it could possibly be, and I hated it.”

He trails off, and a lonely tear runs down his face as he looks down into his empty coffee cup to avoid meeting my eye.

“’I think it’s coming for me,’ he told me just before he died,” he whispers reluctantly after a moment of silence, “and he smiled. ‘The black parade,’ he explained when I didn’t understand, and he seemed at peace with it. ‘I’d bet you anything it looks just like we imagined, and you’ll be there to take my hand.’”

He shakes his head as if disbelief.

“He wasn’t scared,” he continues, in awe. “He just accepted the fact that death was coming for him, and he was completely calm. He held my hand and let me kiss him for the last time, and then he just closed his eyes and took a deep breath. ‘’Cause the hardest part of this is leaving you,’ he sang in a hushed voice, and I didn’t know what to do, what to say.”

He sighs and wipes frantically at his eyes, to no avail because the tears just keep on flowing.

“And then… then he never took another breath. He was just gone. I couldn’t believe it, suddenly everything just hurt and I screamed out, nurses flowed into the room and the kids and Jamia and Ray and Mikey, everyone came in and it was such a chaos, and I just couldn’t concentrate on anything but the feeling of Frankie’s hand in mind, slowly growing cold. I wouldn’t let go of him, I wouldn’t let them take him away. I don’t remember how long I stayed there, but when they finally got me to leave, I watched them cover him with a sheet and I couldn’t believe that he really was gone.”

Though Frank’s death came as a shock for all of them, Gerard and the rest of the family had to pull themselves together to organize a funeral for him. In a small church in Belleville, New Jersey, friends and family gathered on August 1st, and Gerard had planned it all together with Jamia.

“He needed to be buried in Jersey,” he explains, “because that had always been his favorite place in the entire world. It was his home, and that was where he would get his final rest. There was no other place. And though I thought it would be difficult, not getting to visit his grave as often as I could have if he had been buried in California, I knew that it was what he would have wanted.”

Gerard has still tried to visit the grave as often as he can, and generally visits New Jersey once a month. Sometimes he brings Jamia, their daughters, Miles and the kids, but most often, he is alone. 

“I was going to hold a speech,” he says when we talk about the funeral, “and it hurt that I couldn’t do it as Frankie’s spouse. I had to do it as his brother, because not everyone in that room knew that we had been together, and it was difficult. My voice kept breaking and I couldn’t keep from crying, and it felt too unceremonious looking out into the crowd and speaking to them, so instead I looked at Frank where he lay in his open coffin throughout the entire speech, and I spoke straight to him. He just lay there, holding Pansy in his arms, because he had always wanted to be buried with her, and he just looked so peaceful and I couldn’t stop staring at him. I knew that I would never get to see his face again, and so I needed to keep the image of him fresh in my mind.”

Sitting down again on the first row after the speech, Gerard couldn’t control his emotions. Tears streamed down his face through the entire ceremony, and in the end when he and Ray were going to perform, he needed to pull himself together though it was hard.

“’Desert Song’ was really the obvious choice to sing,” Gerard remembers with tears in his eyes. “It had always been one of Frankie’s favorite songs, and he had actually always joked about it when he was younger and said that that was the one song he wanted to me to sing at his funeral, and as I and Ray performed it by his coffin it suddenly got a whole new meaning. ‘From backstage to the doctor, from the earth to the morgue’ was one of the lines that just suddenly meant so much more to me, I finally understood what I had been writing about all those years ago. I had always felt that ‘from backstage to the doctor’ was about Frankie, in a way, because he was always the one who got hurt at shows and stuff and I was always so worried about him.”

He pauses and takes a shaky breath before continuing.

“And when I sang ‘I can see you awake anytime in my head’, that’s when it really hit me that he was gone. It was just the realization that when I closed my eyes, he was there, but as soon as I opened them again, he would be gone. The realization that I would never get to see him again, that all I would have from there on until forever would just be an image in my head, that was terrifying. I would never get to hear his voice again, never get to see him smile. The song was so empty, with just Ray on acoustic guitar, and all I could think of was this guitar part that was missing and I realized that from there on, there would _always_ be a guitar part missing. My Chemical Romance would never be complete again, no one could ever fill the void he left and that was scary. For the first time in my life I really understood ‘Desert Song’, I understood that I could see him awake anytime in my head, but he was only going to be a memory, he would never wake up. Never again.”

Gerard got so overwhelmed with emotion that he was unable to finish the song, and he broke down and fell to his knees on the floor during the last few lines, burying his face in his hands and trembling with tears. Ray continued playing until the song was over, and then the two friends embraced tightly, and no words needed to be said. There was complete silence in the church hall, only Gerard’s sobs echoing through the room. And after a few moments of silence, Mikey walked up to them as well and joined them. It was the first time they all realized that My Chemical Romance was dead and gone as well, and that realization hit them hard.

“When Frankie died,” Gerard explains, “My Chemical Romance died with him. There could never have been a My Chemical Romance without all four of us, and with one of us down, there was no band anymore. We had ended the band long ago, but in that moment, hugging each other at Frankie’s funeral, that was when we realized that there would never ever be a My Chemical Romance again, that was when we realized it was all over. And it was so heartbreaking, because Frankie and My Chem were such huge parts of my life, and to find that all that had vanished just killed me. He was such a central part of who I was, who I had always been, and without him I just didn’t know who I was anymore. I had lost everything, and I couldn’t believe that he was gone.”

As the pallbearers carried the coffin out of the church hall, ‘Cancer’ was played through the speakers. The entire crowd followed them outside to watch the coffin get buried, and Gerard remembers the moment as one of the worst in his life.

“’Cancer’ was another obvious song to play at the funeral,” he explains, “because it had always been Frankie’s favorite song of ours. I couldn’t have sung it myself, there was no way, because it just held too much emotion and too much meaning, and just knowing that lyrics from that song were Frankie’s last words was just too much for me to bear. But the song needed to be played, so since I refused to perform it we had to play the record instead. It was awful, walking out with the others and hearing those words, words I’ll never be able to hear again without seeing his face before my eyes.”

He trails off, looking away out the window as if to clear his head, and he doesn’t say anything. What was the worst part about the funeral, I ask him softly after a few minutes of silence, and he bites his bottom lip thoughtfully, silent tears still running down his cheeks.

“I think,” he begins quietly, “watching the coffin get lowered into the ground was the worst part. Because through the entire ceremony, he was there, I could look at his face, I could see him holding onto Pansy. But when they nailed the coffin shut and lowered it into the grave it was such a definite ending, that I would never ever get to see his face again. I threw a rose onto the coffin before they covered it with dirt, and it just felt like I would never be happy again. I had lost my best friend, my lover, my soulmate, and I would never be whole again.”

  
**Chapter Sixteen: Lies and Reasons**  


Frank’s death became a turning point in Gerard’s life, and he realized that for once and for all, he was all alone. And much like after Lindsey had passed away, he locked himself up in his art studio again, but this time, he found himself unable to produce anything. It was as if all of his creativity had drained out of him, and that was scary for a man who had always been creating.

“All I could think about was Frankie,” he remembers. “All I could see was his face. Our kids and Mikey and Ray, they tried to reach me but I was so caught up in sorrow that I didn’t even notice them. They just didn’t exist to me, my entire world was Frankie and because he was gone, I had a hard time figuring out what to do with myself. And I wanted to channel all those emotions into art or songwriting or anything, but I just couldn’t. I couldn’t think of anything to do, and basically all I had was words in my head, words about him.”

With thoughts of Frank overflowing in his head, Gerard took to the only way of escaping he knew of; he started to write. 

“I was thinking about how I fell in love with him in the first place, how he had been a part of my life,” he explains. “And somehow it felt like I needed to pay homage to his memory, I needed to show the world what an amazing man he had been. So I penned it all down, all my thoughts, My Chemical Romance’s entire history, and I isolated myself from the world for weeks in a row because there was just so much to write about. It felt liberating, in a way, to get to tell a story, but somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that it could never be published, the world could never know.”

Writing became the only way for Gerard to deal with his loss, and slowly he started to come back to life again. It became therapeutic, in a way, to remember everything that had happened and to put it all down on paper. While his daughters, son and the rest of his family struggled to deal with the loss of Frank, they also found themselves having to struggle to get in contact with Gerard, because he isolated himself from them. Gerard remembers a particularly difficult conversation with Bandit, and he realized he couldn’t keep ignoring them.

“She was so fucking mad at me,” he groans tiredly, and it’s easy to see that he thinks she was right. “Santana and Emilie had just lost their grandfather, and I hadn’t really thought of it like that until Bandit came and told me that it was like they had lost _both_ their grandfathers, because I hadn’t talked to them in months. And that really opened my eyes to what I was doing, the kids and our daughters and son were just as sad as I was, but I was the one torturing them with my absence when really all they wanted was some comfort. It wasn’t right of me to keep blocking them out, so I really tried after that to spend more time with them, and I babysat the kids quite a lot and generally tried to be a part of their family again.”

Jamia found it difficult to cope with losing her husband and best friend, and escaped on her own to Hawaii for a few months, to clear her head. No one heard from her in a long time, and the children missed their grandmother but no one could get her to come back.

“She took it so hard,” Gerard sighs, “and I don’t blame her for wanting to get away. She had spent her entire life with Frankie, and then suddenly he was just gone. Anyone would have gone mad if that happened to them. So I get that she left, though it was hard on the kids because suddenly all they had left was me and their parents. Two of their grandparents were dead, and one was away, and so I was all they had left. That was strange, not having anyone else to turn to, but Mikey and Ray were there for me when I needed them and I probably would have gone insane without them.”

Being constantly reminded of My Chemical Romance’s past and his relationship with Frank, Gerard made a decision to finish writing down the story of his life. With the help of the rest of the band, his daughters and son, and even the children, Gerard slowly started to remember everything that had happened in his life up until that point. And in 2054, almost two years after Frank’s death, Gerard had a finished manuscript of his memoirs, and he pitched the idea to a publisher but got instantly rejected.

“There was too much obvious love for Frankie in what I had written,” he explains, “and I guess I needed another person to say it for me to realize it. I hadn’t exactly revealed that Frankie and I had been together all along, because I felt that was a secret the world wasn’t ready to know, but there were definitely some very detailed descriptions of how he made me feel, and though I thought I had been sneaky writing it in loose metaphors and stuff, the publisher saw through me instantly and he really made me question whether or not I wanted the truth to come out.”

Together with his family and the publisher, Gerard decided that in order for the book to be published, it needed to be edited, so Gerard sat down and rewrote most of it, to make it less revealing and more like a story he knew the fans could accept.

“It needed to be believable,” he says, “and it needed to be something that wasn’t too revealing. My Chemical Romance’s story had to be clean, so I changed it.”

He pauses.

“And that was the worst decision I could have made.”

‘The True Life of a Fabulous Killjoy’ was released in December, 2055, and My Chemical Romance fans were thrilled to see the band’s entire history summarized. The book portrayed Frank as Gerard’s faithful best friend, and described their relationship as entirely platonic. Their odd choice of living arrangements were explained as a pure need to keep their families together, and both their wives were portrayed as their ones and only. Gerard wrote Frank as his brother, and their children not as siblings but as mere best friends, and though he explained how both their families merged together and turned into one he didn’t reveal the reasons behind it. But as soon as the book was published, Gerard started to feel like something wasn’t quite right, and as he held the finished copy in his hands, he realized that he had made a mistake.

“I wanted to honor Frankie’s memory with the book,” he explains, “but instead I had told a lie. Frankie would never have wanted me to do that. He would have wanted me to tell the truth about us, to tell the story like how it happened. I hadn’t realized it before, but by lying about our relationship I was soiling and besmirching his memory and I didn’t want that to happen.”

So Gerard did what he thought Frank would have wanted him to do. He stopped the production of the book, telling his publisher that he didn’t want the story out anymore, and they stopped printing the book instantly. And suddenly people wanted it even more, because they knew that something was wrong with it, and copies were sold for extraordinarily high prices at all retail markets. Only about 50’000 copies were ever made, and to this day they are considered rarities and hold great value for the band’s fans.

“People started to realize that there was something off with that book when I cancelled the production of it,” Gerard remembers dejectedly. “It became so much bigger than it was ever supposed to be, and just like back in the day conspiracy theories and even fan fiction, weirdly enough, started floating around on the web again and people were reading so much into it. I didn’t know what to do, that book started so many rumors and I just didn’t know how to deal with it.”

While ‘The True Life of a Fabulous Killjoy’ started a commotion amongst My Chemical Romance’s fans, Gerard shied away from all attention and tried to make up his mind of what to do next. Reading through all of his early entries for the original book, he realized that in order for him to finally get some peace, he needed to tell the truth. 

“Frankie wouldn’t have wanted me to hide,” he says. “He would have wanted me to stand up for myself and for our love, and he would have wanted me to be proud of what we had. So really, I just needed to get the truth out there.”

With his mind dead set on finally honoring Frank like he deserved to be honored, Gerard set to work on trying to find the best ways to make it happen. After thoroughly researching authors and journalists in the My Chemical Romance fanbase, he turned to me in April, 2056, asking me to listen to what he had to say.

“I need to tell you a story,” he said when he called me the first time, “and I need you to tell it to the world.”

  
**Epilogue**  


For me to make the decision to join Gerard in this project was easy, and even before we got to work I had an idea of what the story was going to be about. But why didn’t he just release the original story himself, I wonder? Why did he choose to let someone else write it for him?

“I had already tried that once,” he explains to me, eyeing my tape-recorder directly, “and I think I knew that I couldn’t handle that again. It was so much easier to just talk about it and tell someone a story, than to sit down and actually write everything down on paper. It would have been hard, seeing the story unravel before my eyes, and I had already understood that in order for the truth to come out, I would have to rely on someone else to do it for me. Because if I had handled it on my own, I might have just chickened out again.”

And how does it feel, knowing that the truth is just about to hit the world, I ask him, and he swallows nervously.

“I’m eighty fucking years old,” he laughs a little bitterly, “and I’ve been living a lie until right now. I’ve disappointed people, I’ve disappointed myself and while I’ve been trying not to be a hero, people have pegged me a savior anyway and it scares me. The purpose of this book -” 

He pauses and sighs.

“The purpose of this book is to finally do the right thing, to finally make Frankie proud of me. I want to show the world how much of a liar I have been, how much I’ve been avoiding truths, and I want the world to know that Frankie was a great man. I don’t think I could ever truly make the world understand what an amazing person he was, if I refused to tell the truth about how Frankie loved me. Because that was always his most amazing quality; his ability to love. Being loved by Frankie was a blessing, a dream come true, and never did a day go past without me thinking how incredibly lucky I was to have him. And it would be such a waste, not telling everyone else about everything that made him extraordinary.”

He smiles at me, and for the first time since we started talking the smile reaches his eyes.

“And I think as soon as this book comes out, as soon as people know the truth, I can die in peace,” he says, and it’s shocking but he doesn’t seem to care. “I don’t believe in God or heaven or hell, but I think wherever Frankie is, he’s watching me and feeling proud, for the first time since he left. And when I join him, whenever that is, I know that we’ll be able to be together again, and we will be okay. So I’m not scared of the consequences of telling the truth, I’m not afraid people will start to hate me or My Chem. I’m just excited, because I know that finally I did what Frankie would have wanted me to do, and when we meet again, I’m sure he’ll be welcoming me with open arms.”

And those words mark the end of our interview sessions. I turn off my tape-recorder, we gather our things and as we part ways outside of the coffee house, I can’t help but hope that he’s right.

  
**The End.**  


**Author's Note:**

> Comment here or on the [masterpost](http://maybegasoline.livejournal.com/9683.html) at my journal!


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